A Warning from the Past
Earlier today, I was in an American Legion hanging up posters and they had the TV on. Well they had two TVs on, actually, Gunsmoke over the bar and the impeachment proceedings behind the pool tables. A bad guy in a black hat was threatening a woman in the bar, and in the billiard room Adam Schiff was addressing the Senate.
As I listened, I thought, man, Adam's been working on his speechifying -- them's some purty words there. He seemed to be describing President Trump, but in nearly poetic terms, brutally direct but at the same time the language was decorous and genteel. I saw some writing at the bottom of the screen and as I came closer to the TV I discovered that Schiff was reading a quote from Alexander Hamilton, writing to George Washington in 1792. Here it is:
As I listened, I thought, man, Adam's been working on his speechifying -- them's some purty words there. He seemed to be describing President Trump, but in nearly poetic terms, brutally direct but at the same time the language was decorous and genteel. I saw some writing at the bottom of the screen and as I came closer to the TV I discovered that Schiff was reading a quote from Alexander Hamilton, writing to George Washington in 1792. Here it is:
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'Donald Trump is not a new or unique phenomenon, people like him have always existed. More than two centuries ago the Founders recognized the danger this kind of person posed to democracy and the way of life in our new country.
posted by JimK at 3:33 PM
204 Comments:
Moscow Mitch McConnell is like the Pharisees, using the strict letter of the law to avoid fulfilling the spirit of the law.
"As I listened, I thought, man, Adam's been working on his speechifying -- them's some purty words there."
Did you hear what happened tonight?
Adam got home and his eyeballs fell out in the kitchen.
The hospital thinks they can get 'em back in by morning.
Lucky us. We get treated to some more purty speechifying.
"He seemed to be describing President Trump, but in nearly poetic terms, brutally direct but at the same time the language was decorous and genteel."
The guy's another Walt Whitman.
Almost makes you forget he's trying to overturn the last election because he doesn't like a telephone call the President made.
"I saw some writing at the bottom of the screen and as I came closer to the TV I discovered that Schiff was reading a quote from Alexander Hamilton, writing to George Washington in 1792."
I guess hiring that intern with the history degree paid off.
"Here it is:
When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.'"
Yeah, George, Alexander, and the boys had a solution for such a character: vote against him!
And, if that doesn't work: shallenge him to a doowell!
"Donald Trump is not a new or unique phenomenon, people like him have always existed. More than two centuries ago the Founders recognized the danger this kind of person posed to democracy and the way of life in our new country."
Actually, they were really concerned that impeachment would become a partisan political tool, where a party in control of the House of Representatives would vote lockstep to remove a President of the opposition party.
In their genius, however, they protected us from that, as well: it take two-thirds of the Senate to convict so one party alone can't do it.
Looks like you'll have to win the election against a President presiding over the lowest unemployment in history.
Who will you put up as an alternative?
A drooling socialist who just survived a heart attack, or a bumbling and senile former VP whose son sold access to his Dad?
What the heck, you may as well try Hillary again!!
hahahahahahaha!!!!
Next fall will be so much fun.
Remember how Trump handled Jeb Bush?
A Sunday afternoon picnic with the nuns compared to what the next Dem nominee will go through.
President Trump’s got Davos cheering the US economy, Hillary beating up a socialist who is leading in the Dem nomination polls, and an impeachment farce heading towards another big win for him.
No wonder he’s laughing his way back to the White House.
1. first time a President has been impeached without any criminal charges being filed
2. first time a President has been impeached while running for re-election
3. first time a President has been impeached without a single member of his party supporting the impeachment
4. first time a President has been impeached when it was clear to, literally, everyone that the Senate would acquit him
5. first time a President has been impeached without the House finishing making its case and desperately trying to get the Senate to complete the work
Next November is going to be so sad for TTF....
Yesterday, when Adam Shifty Eyeballs was purty speechifying, he said the Dems are trying to save the integrity of the 2020 election. Never before has one political party claimed they were trying to save the next election by overturning the voters' will in the last election.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is getting more and more nervous daily.
"Joe Biden became visibly irate with CBS reporter Ed O'Keefe after the newsman asked the former vice president why he attacked Sen. Bernie Sanders this week."
He knows that the President's lawyers will defend the President by bringing him and Hunter to the Senate to be grilled about their activities in the Ukraine with about a week to go before voting starts in Iowa.
Drip, drip, drip.....
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "He knows that the President's lawyers will defend the President by bringing him and Hunter to the Senate to be grilled about their activities in the Ukraine with about a week to go before voting starts in Iowa."
Lol, if they want him to testify, all they need to do is subpoena him, so what are they waiting for? No one is stopping the Republicans from this, they can do so without anyone else's consent.
The truth is that the last thing Republicans want is either of the Biden's testifying, this is just more propaganda on their part. They're looking for an excuse to not call any witnesses even though 69% of the American public wants witnesses.
Republicans are damned if they do and damned if they don't. They can continue with a sham quicky trial and the public will punish them at the ballot box for hiding the truth.
Or they can call witnesses and present evidence as the public demands which will destroy Tump's laughable defence and see him removed from office.
The only hope for Trump is Russia changing the vote count. No wonder Moscow Mitch McConnell won't bring up for a vote any of the bipartisan bills the House passed to protect the integrity of the 2020 election.
Demand that Mitch McConnell bring up for a vote the bill requiring back up paper ballots for voting machines. Don't let Putin's henchmen take away the right of the American public to choose a president other than Trump!
Our analysis also shows corruption is more pervasive in countries where big money can flow freely into electoral campaigns and where governments only listen to the voices of wealthy or well-connected individuals.
While no country earns a perfect score on the #CP12019, countries at the top also have stronger enforcement of campaign finance regulations and broader consultation in policy decisions.
69% of the American public believes witnesses must be called at Trump's trial for it to be fair and honest - why is Mitch McConnell blocking the clear will of a supermajority of Americans???
Mitch McConnell has the impossible task of trying to find a fine line between completely shutting down evidence and witnesses in the Trump trial versus letting all the evidence be presented and all the witnesses speak - Trump is screwed whichever way McConnell goes, he's either removed from office because McConnll lets to much of the truth be presented or he's defeated at the ballot box because its obvious Mitch and the Republicans are hiding the truth.
It'll be a democratic president in 2020.
Ever since Trump took office its been one damning revelation after another - this will continue all they way up to election day.
Trump is the first president in history to never have had an approval rating above 50%. Its only going to drop between now and election day - he can't win :)
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "first time a President has been impeached without the House finishing making its case and desperately trying to get the Senate to complete the work"
First, that's a lie. Second, the reason the work isn't as complete as it could be is that Trump refused to comply with 71 document requests (as he's constitutionally required to do) and Senate Republicans blocked Democrats from getting it and having all available evidence heard at Trump's trial.
Standard Republican operating procedure:
Prevent Democrats from getting the information they want and then claim Trump shouldn't be impeached because Democrats don't have all the information.
Corrupt hypocrisy at its extremes. The American public sees through this and won't stand for it. Its going to be a Democratic president in 2020.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Never before has one political party claimed they were trying to save the next election by overturning the voters' will in the last election."
Oh, you mean like the Republicans did when they impeached Bill Clinton?
3 million more Americans voted for Hillary than voted for Trump. It was the will of the people that Hillary be president
If Trump is innocent, why doesn't he let all the people come forward who witnessed his behavior and exonerate him?
If Trump is so innocent, why doesn't he appear in person at his trial to defend himself?
If he's so innocent he has nothing to fear from allowing witnesses to speak and all the documents the investigation requested to be received, all that would just prove his innocence.
But he hides all documents and threatens witnesses who want to testify in his trial because he's obviously guilty as charged.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "first time a President has been impeached without any criminal charges being filed"
The only reason charges haven't been filed is because its DOJ policy that they can't charge a sitting president. But you want to deceive readers and lead them to erroneously believe Trump hasn't committed any crimes while the Office of Management and Budget has investigated and said Trump broke the law by witholding desperately needed military aid to help Ukraine protect itself from Russia.
Not to mention that over 1000 federal prosecutors have signed an open letter that said if any other American had done what the Mueller Report documented Trump doing, they'd be in jail.
Utah bans doomed attempts to convert gays to heterosexuals
The religious right in the United States promotes this so called "conversion" "therapy" not out of any desire to help gays or a believe that gays can change, but solely to attempt to justify their senseless war on harmless lgbt people.
Study after study has shown gays cannot change their sexual orientation and this attempt has driven many gays to suicide. Cruelly, the religious right encourages young religious gay men to enter into this quack "therapy" and when they fail to change same sex attractions into opposite sex attractions they're told they failed because they weren't holy enough, because they didn't love Jesus enough and that they'll burn in hell if they don't at least pretend to have changed.
Not surprisingly, many of these young religious men and women kill themselves because they are so devastated by what the religious right tells them after a failed attempt to change.
The religious right can't tolerate the idea that their god failed to change the sexual orientation of someone who sincerely tried, so they destroy these innocent gay men and women rather than to taint the image of the god in their heads.
Christianity and Islam are psychological torture.
Republican state lawmakers have filed a wave of bills that would ban medical professionals from treating transgender teens with hormones and sex reassignment surgery, protecting children from lunatic fringe parents
More than half a dozen statehouses are considering bills that would penalize medical professionals — and, sometimes, parents — who give young people access to puberty-blocking medicines and surgical "treatments" that mutilate them. Lawmakers note that they are protecting vulnerable children who may be experimenting with their identity from making life-altering changes to their bodies, practices that advocates for transgender youths call dangerous.
South Dakota on Wednesday became the first state to take action, with a House committee passing a bill that would punish doctors who provide such treatments to people under 16 with a year in jail and a fine of $2,000.
State Rep. Fred Deutsch (R) said he introduced the bill because the solution for “children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with megadoses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs.”
Similar bills have been introduced in recent weeks in South Carolina, Colorado, Florida, Oklahoma and Missouri. State lawmakers in Kentucky, Georgia and Texas have also announced such plans.
Missouri’s bill would report parents who consent to such treatment to child welfare officials for child abuse. Doctors also would have their licenses revoked if they perform gender-reassignment treatments.
It's become apparent that such medical intervention is being used on youths too young to understand the potential consequences. A bill under consideration in Florida would make it a felony for doctors to provide certain hormones or gender reassignment surgery to minors, even with parental consent.
“A great majority of Americans and Floridians agree that a 12-year-old should not change their body in such a permanent way,” said Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini (R), who introduced the bill.
Sabatini said he was inspired to file the legislation after learning about a divorce custody case in Texas in which a father objected to his 7-year-old child transitioning, which the mother encouraged. Donald Trump Jr. tweeted about the case in October, calling it “child abuse.”
A Florida statehouse bill will repeal ordinances that prohibit “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ youths. Legislation restricting transgender students’ sports participation is pending in Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Washington state.
South Dakota’s legislature is often used as a testing ground for bills to combat the gay agenda, because Republicans hold a supermajority in the statehouse and there’s a low cost for lobbying in the state. It was one of the first states to pass a law restricting transgender students’ bathroom use. It helped build momentum for a flurry of “bathroom bills” across the country.
Deutsch said he began considering the bill last spring, after he met people on Twitter who said they were formerly transgender and were “hurting and suffering” as a result of the treatments.
He has framed the bill as “homegrown,” but said he consulted with pro-family groups such as the Liberty Counsel and Kelsey Coalition as he was drafting it. In October, Deutsch attended the Summit for Protecting Children from Sexualization in the District hosted by the Heritage Foundation, which discussed similar efforts criminalizing transgender care in other states, he said.
A website promoting Deutsch’s bill includes videos from the Heritage Foundation and a “parent resource guide” from the Minnesota Family Council, a organization aligned with the Family Research Council. The website also includes quotes from people who say they regret gender transitioning.
Former Vice President Joe Biden flatly refused to appear as a witness at the impeachment trial for President Trump at a campaign stop in Iowa on Wednesday.
Biden said Republicans are trying to turn the impeachment trial in "political theater" and a "farce."
The core allegation against President Trump is that he asked Ukraine begin an investigation into why Biden's son Hunter was inappropriately given a seat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma and paid a million dollars a year.
"Hunter said it was a mistake for him to have taken the board position," Biden said.
"The reason I would not make the deal, the bottom line is, this is a constitutional issue.
We’re not going to turn it into a farce or political theater. I want no part of that," he said about the idea of testifying. "I’m not going to play his game."
"They are trying to turn it into political theater," he added. "But I want no part of being any part of that."
Biden sounds nervous, and scared...
Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for President Trump, threatened Thursday to go public with information that would expose corruption by 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
“Everything I tried to tell the press last March is now coming out, and more. I will now start to reveal the evidence directly to you, the People,” the former New York mayor tweeted. “The Biden Family Enterprise made millions by selling public office. Then when Joe was Obama’s Point Man, they ALL made millions.”
Giuliani also offered to testify in Trump’s impeachment trial taking place in the Senate.
“I would love to see a trial. I’d love to be a witness – because I’m a potential witness in the trial – and explain to everyone the corruption that I found in Ukraine, that far out-surpasses any that I’ve ever seen before, involving Joe Biden and a lot of other Democrats,” he said
Children should be seen and not heard.
That used to be common sense. Anti-child? Full of contempt and bitterness? No. Ageist? Threatened by a younger generation? No. Children are ignorant.
Not stupid. No, children are not intrinsically stupid. Besides, there are plenty of stupid adults. Anyone watching the impeachment proceedings? But children are without knowledge, that is, have not gained knowledge. Why? Because they are… children. Knowledge must be acquired, and that requires time.
So, we can appreciate the enthusiasm and energy of youth, but their political views should be flatly ignored. And this is especially true when it comes to energy policies and climate change.
The annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, once again hosted young climate activists spewing their ignorance. Their leader, Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” teenage eco-warrior Greta Thunberg shouted that “our house is on fire.”
Is it?
Surely the Australian fires have been tragic to watch with loss of life and untold destruction of homes, communities, and wildlife. But less sensational a story than the reductionist “big oil companies heat planet” is the actions of over 180 individuals, some arsonists, some disobeying fire ban rules. Greta didn’t mention that.
Nor, too, did she mention the aboriginal people who have practiced controlled burning for centuries, but have been prevented from doing so by the government. Aboriginal elders in Sydney knew the fire was coming. “It should have happened sooner.”
Funny, if this were a story about native culture, we’d be railing against disenfranchisement or marginalization. But in the new hierarchy of social justice values Greta > Native Culture.
But Australia is in a drought! Surely that is proof of climate change. You know who was also in a drought? California. For seven years. It basically ended last year, and the most recent measure shows that 96% of the state is back to normal. What ended the great California drought?
Climate change.
Noticeably absent from Ms. Thunberg’s Davos screed was any country other than America. S
he blasted America from withdrawing from the Gospel of the Paris Climate Accord. But there was no mention of the world’s largest polluter of poisonous Sulphur Dioxide: China, India, and Russia. China emits more carbon dioxide than the US and the EU combined. China and India are also world leaders in ocean pollution, dumping plastics directly into the waterways.
How cozy to blast America in neutral Switzerland about the pollution caused by China. Makes one want to compose a folksong.
Look, I mean Ms. Thunberg no ill will.
But the feeling is not mutual.
When she makes her list of demands that we stop burning fossil fuels immediately, I think it’s fair to ask her “who should die first?” Because people will die. Look at developing nations. The leading cause of death among children is malnutrition and diarrhea. Fossil fuels could fix that. They not only help sow, irrigate, and harvest crops, they also fertilize and transport them. Refrigeration keeps perishable foods from spoiling. Transportation delivers it quickly. Fossil fuels help sustain life.
Fellow radical and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took an even more extreme step at a debate last year when he supported taxpayer funded abortion for poor countries to combat climate change. Here, too, it’s fair to ask “which countries?”
I wonder if they get a say before the American taxpayer aborts their children. Probably not. But like I said at the beginning, there are plenty of stupid adults.
While the climate is indeed changing, it’s impossible to have a productive conversation with those whose only lexicon is hyperbole and who remain politically frightened to say the word China. She’s a kid so I will cut Ms. Thunberg and her young eco-warrior peers some slack. But when it comes to energy policy, the electric grid, the lifeblood of the economy and our very way of life, the adults must do the talking.
So glad we have an electoral college system.
Without it, the nuts in California might dictate to and tyrannize the rest of the country.
Thanks to the founding fathers, the auto worker in Detroit, the cowboy in Oklahoma, the coal miner in West Virginia, and the fishermen in Louisiana, all have a say too.
How about the fiddler in Nashville, the ski instructor in Park City, the furniture maker in North Carolina, and apple picker in Washington - they all get a say thanks to the electoral college too.
the Dems have thought they should impeach Trump since he was inaugurated
but, they couldn't come up with anything
the Mueller report found nothing, neither did exhaustive investigations into his business dealing
the election was coming up and they know they'll lose to a President who has, remarkably, kept his promises and succeeded wildly
so they made up a couple of non-crime charges
why?
because they dare not mention his real impeachable offense:
he defeated Hillary
Dems need to read Dale Carnegie.
Two key moderate Senate Republicans criticized House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., on Thursday after he claimed this week that senators who do not support hearing from witnesses and entering documents into President Donald Trump's impeachment trial would be complicit in a cover-up.
An aide told NBC News that Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was "offended" when Nadler, one of the seven House impeachment managers, made the accusation on the Senate floor.
Murkowski is one of a handful of moderate GOP senators who have expressed an openness to calling witnesses, including top Trump administration officials. For Democratic senators who need four Republican votes to support them on the issue, Murkowski's would be a critical vote.
Susan Collins of Maine, another Republican who has been open to witnesses, wrote a note to Chief Justice John Roberts, who is presiding over the trial, taking issue with Nadler's remark, according to a spokesperson.
"Well, I was stunned by Congressman Nadler's approach, and it reminded me that if we were in a normal debate in the Senate that the rule will be invoked to strike the words of the Senator, for imputing another Senator in this case," she said in a statement.
"So, I did write a note raising the issue of whether there had been a violation of the rules of the Senate, and I gave that note to Laura Dove, and well shortly thereafter the Chief Justice did admonish both sides and I was glad that he did," she added.
Dove is the Senate majority secretary.
Four years ago, Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary by the largest margin ever for a non-incumbent in the New Hampshire primary. Hillary conspired with the DNC to play dirty tricks to defeat him. So, Hillary was horrified that Bernie is doing so well and she went on the attack last week. Subsequently, Bernie has taken the lead in national polls.
Now, Sir Barry Obama is growing concerned about avowed socialist Senator Bernie Sanders' rise in the primary polls, and will speak out publicly against the Democratic candidate, according to a new report.
Obama, who has remained notably silent during the Democratic primary, will soon change that policy due to his concern over Sanders' increasingly far-out leftist proposals, friends and associates of the ex-president say.
Obama has told people in private that Sanders is both temperamentally and politically unfit to beat President Donald Trump in the 2020 general election.
Really, Sir Barry?
You think a socialist might have trouble defeating a President with the lowest unemployment rate in history?
Maybe Michelle should run!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.
The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does the words are usually scripted and perfunctory:
“The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.”
“The chaplain will lead us in prayer.”
“The sergeant at arms will deliver the proclamation.”
“The majority leader is recognized.”
Otherwise, he sits and watches. He rests his chin in his hand. He stares straight ahead. He sits back and interlocks his fingers. He plays with his pen. He takes his reading glasses off and puts them on again. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down. He roots around in his briefcase for something — anything? — to occupy him.
Roberts’s captivity is entirely fitting: He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system. As representatives of all three branches of government attend this unhappy family reunion, the living consequences of the Roberts Court’s decisions, and their corrosive effect on democracy, are plain to see.
Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment. The two Rudy Giuliani associates engaged in key abuses — the ouster of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the attempts to force Ukraine’s president to announce investigations into Trump’s political opponents — gained access to Trump by funneling money from a Ukrainian oligarch to the president’s super PAC.
The Roberts Court’s decisions led to this moment in indirect ways, as well. The court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act and spurred a new wave of voter suppression. The decision in 2014′s McCutcheon further surrendered campaign finance to the wealthiest. The 2018 Janus decision hobbled the ability of labor unions to counter wealthy donors, while the 2019 Rucho ruling blessed partisan gerrymandering, expanding anti-democratic tendencies.
The consequences? Falling confidence in government, and a growing perception that Washington had become a “swamp” corrupted by political money, fueled Trump’s victory. The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates. The new dominance of ideologically extreme outside groups and donors led lawmakers on both sides to give their patrons what they wanted: conflict over collaboration and purity at the cost of paralysis. The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans and extend the electoral power of Republicans in disproportion to the popular vote...
...Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems, but its rulings have worsened the pathologies — uncompromising views, mindless partisanship and vitriol — visible in this impeachment trial. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), no doubt recognizing that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is helping to preserve his party’s Senate majority, has devoted much of his career to extending conservatives’ advantage in the judiciary.
He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy. And, expanding on earlier transgressions by Democrats, he blew up generations of Senate procedures and precedents requiring the body to operate by consensus so that he could confirm more Trump judicial appointees.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. On the day the impeachment trial opened, the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare. The court sided with Republicans who opposed an immediate Supreme Court review because the GOP feared the ruling could hurt it if the decision came before the 2020 election.
Roberts had been warned about this sort of thing. The late Justice John Paul Stevens, in his Citizens United dissent, wrote: “Americans may be forgiven if they do not feel the Court has advanced the cause of self-government today.”
Justice Stephen Breyer, in his McCutcheon dissent, warned that the new campaign finance system would be “incapable of dealing with the grave problems of democratic legitimacy.”
Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law, a legislature too paralyzed to do anything about it — and a chief justice coming face to face with the system he broke.
Wow, thirteen posts in a row by Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous after my last post - you can tell they're scared of what I wrote.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem"
What Republicans like Wyatt/Regina mean when they say this is that they want to take away Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and they want to force you to pay for private police and fire protection.
"Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests."
Our analysis also shows corruption is more pervasive in countries where big money can flow freely into electoral campaigns and where governments only listen to the voices of wealthy or well-connected individuals.
While no country earns a perfect score on the #CP12019, countries at the top also have stronger enforcement of campaign finance regulations and broader consultation in policy decisions.
Over 70% of the American public believes witnesses must be called at Trump's trial for it to be fair and honest - why is Mitch McConnell blocking the clear will of a supermajority of Americans???
90,000 documents for a Democrat lying about a consensual sex act.
0 documents for a Republican bribing a foreign country to cheat in *another* election.
#GOPCoverup
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"There is justice in John Roberts being forced to preside silently over the impeachment trial of President Trump, hour after hour, day after tedious day.
The chief justice of the United States, as presiding officer, doesn’t speak often, and when he does the words are usually scripted and perfunctory"
he doesn't seem to mind
that's what the Constitution calls for
Merrick Garland sure wishes it was him
the American people give Roberts a much higher approval rating ham anyone else in the room
he did get a chance to lecture Dems on decorum after Susan Collins sent him a note objecting to Jerry Nadler's uncivil comments
your comment amounts to a huge non sequitur
let's look at a few foolish highlights:
"Otherwise, he sits and watches. He starts to write something, then puts his pen back down."
it was a note to Merrick Garland "having a great time, wish you were here"
"He is forced to witness, with his own eyes, the mess he and his colleagues on the Supreme Court have made of the U.S. political system"
why would you say that? let's read on
"Ten years to the day before Trump’s impeachment trial began, the Supreme Court released its Citizens United decision, plunging the country into the era of super PACs and unlimited, unregulated, secret campaign money from billionaires and foreign interests. Citizens United, and the resulting rise of the super PAC, led directly to this impeachment."
so your idea is we can't have a healthy democracy unless the government regulates the ability of citizens to petition the government for redress of grievances?
see what I mean by non sequitur?
you do realize that Trump defeated two candidates who raised historic amounts of cash: Jeb and Hillary?
Trump revealed how to get enormous publicity without spending much, in a method that would have worked before or after Citizens United
it was this: take bold positions and agree to do unlimited interviews
"The Republican Party, weakened by the new dominance of outside money, couldn’t stop Trump’s hostile takeover of the party or the takeover of the congressional GOP ranks by far-right candidates."
actually, they could if they present feasible alternatives
they had every opportunity to do so
Trump, btw, is a centrist
"The various decisions also suppress the influence of poorer and non-white Americans"
actually, Trump won largely because he addressed the needs of poorer Americans, which Dems had ignored to press the interests of illegal aliens
and he's kept his promises to them
poorer and non-white Americans are enjoying opportunity and economic growth they have never experienced before
Dems shouldn't take their vote for granted in November
"Certainly, the Supreme Court didn’t create all these problems,"
or, really, any of them
Dems started it decades ago when they went all-out to keep Robert Bork off the Supreme Court
"He effectively stole a Supreme Court seat by refusing for nearly a year to consider President Barack Obama’s eminently qualified nominee, Merrick Garland, to fill a vacancy"
it didn't waste time because he knew the Senate would never confirm Garland
he told Obama to try again
"the Roberts Court rejected a plea by Democrats to expedite its consideration of the latest legal attempt by Republicans to kill Obamacare"
why should a case be expedited to cater to Dem campaigns?
glad the court was impartial
"Now, we are in a crisis of democratic legitimacy: A president who has plainly abused his office and broken the law"
low-level "abuse", in the eyes of some
the place to take that view is the election
Trump has broken no laws
Claire McCaskill says on MSNBC that Republican Senators have told her that Trump doesn't know what he is talking about.
While she doesn't say the word, Trump's dementia is what Claire McCaskill is describing. She emphasizes how the entire Senate knows he's imparied. Enabling him to stay in the WH while deteriorating from dementia will become one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history.
Yet another think tank has downgraded the U.S.'s level of democracy
Democracy index (by @TheEIU)
1 Norway
2 Iceland
3 Sweden
4 N Zealand
7 Canada
9 Austrailia
14 UK
20 France
25 U.S. (categorized as "flawed democracy")
27 Estonia
39 Greece
51 India
78 Ukraine
110 Turkey
134 Russia
159 S Arabia
167 N Korea
"Trump's dementia is what Claire McCaskill is describing. She emphasizes how the entire Senate knows he's imparied. Enabling him to stay in the WH while deteriorating from dementia will become one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history."
Dems and the media constantly said the same about Reagan
like Reagan, Trump has had tremendous success
Claire has Trump Derangement Syndrome
btw, sane people know how to spell "impaired"
"With the Iowa Caucuses just 10 days away, Former Vice President Joe Biden is hitting the airwaves with a new campaign ad that claims he’s the safest choice when it comes to defeating President Donald Trump in November."
the last time a candidate tried to run on being the safest choice was when George HW Bush lost to Bill CLinton
Wyatt/Regina:
If Trump becomes dictator the standard of living for people like you will drop to the same as it is in Russia. The U.S. GDP will drop precipitously as the corrupt ruling class and those with connections take the bulk of the wealth produced by the poor.
The corrupt ruling class (not you) will end up with more money while the total U.S. GDP drops dramatically and the 99%
will take the entire hit in income.
You two need to ask yourselves if that is what you really want.
"In opening statements, House managers examined the debunked conspiracy theories invoked by Pres. Trump.
A @POTUS confidant tells CBS News that GOP senators were warned: "vote against the president & your head will be on a pike.""
Will Moscow Mitch McConnell do the right thing and stop enabling this president to get away with whatever he wants?
Make no mistake about it, if you let Trump do whatever he wants, he will make himself dictator.
Save your democracy when you have the opportunity, don't give Russia, Trump, and Mitch McConnell a second chance to take away the will of the people in November. Remove Trump now.
Trump was right again. Obama and Comey were illegally monitoring his campaign:
The Justice Department has concluded that it should have ended its surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser earlier than it did because it lacked "insufficient predication" to continue eavesdropping, according to an order made public Thursday by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The FBI obtained a warrant in 2016 to eavesdrop on former Trump national security aide Carter Page on suspicions that he was secretly a Russian agent. The Justice Department renewed the warrant three times, including during the early months of the Trump administration.
But the Justice Department's inspector general has harshly criticized the FBI's handing of those applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It says the FBI omitted from the court key details that undercut its original premise about Page, who has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged as part of the investigation into any ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.
In an order made public Thursday, the court's chief judge, James Boasberg, said the Justice Department informed the court last month that two of the four applications were invalid because "there was insufficient predication to establish probable cause to believe that Carter Page was acting as an agent of a foreign power."
The judge also said that the Justice Department had agreed to sequester all of the material collected under all of the Page warrants, pending further review of the Justice Department's IG report and the "outcome of related investigations and any litigation," and the department said that it would update the court at that time. That indicates that the other two applications are also under some type of review, too, though the Justice Department did not elaborate and did not tell the FISA court what would be involved in the sequestration. By January 7, the date of the order, the court had not received any updates.
The court has demanded explanations from the Justice Department by next week about the four applications, and information about how the secrecy of the material was being protected, as well as explanations about the "related investigations" and litigation referenced by the department.
After the inspector general's report, the surveillance court issued a rare and extraordinary public order saying the FBI had submitted "unsupported" information when it applied to eavesdrop on Page. Judge Rosemary Collyer wrote in mid-December, "The frequency with which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether information contained in other FBI applications is reliable." The court directed the FBI to report back by end of the month on what steps it was taking to fix the problems.
all the guys at the Davos summit love Trump now
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/of-course-davos-loves-trump/ar-BBZdcOv?ocid=msn360
they know he was right about trade all along
The problem with "letting the voters decide" is that Trump, PUtin, and McConnell are working every day to take away the ability of the American people to choose a president other than Trump.
I'd love for the people to decide but this president has to go if you are to be confident it will be the people who decide.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump was right again. Obama and Comey were illegally monitoring his campaign"
This has been thoroughly investigated and the Inspector General found there isn't a shred of evidence to support the claim that anyone spied on the Trump campaign.
Republicans’ phony impeachment outrage can’t conceal their deep-seated anxiety
When you watch a trial, whether you’re on a jury yourself or on the couch in front of the TV, the prosecution’s presentation always seems airtight — until you see the defense. So I don’t want to say at this stage that the House managers in Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial have made their case. But seriously, it’s hard to see how the president’s team can plausibly explain away this behavior. Their only choice will be to admit that all the evidence is true and tell the American people that it was perfect.
Republican senators are all doing their part, acting as if the House managers are a bunch of primitive barbarians rampaging through their hallowed halls, gibbering incomprehensibly and rudely insulting them and their president with the shocking suggestion that he might have done something wrong.
You may recall that on the first night of the trial, at the end of an 11-hour day, Chief Justice John Roberts admonished both sides to be careful of their rhetoric because they were speaking in front of the world’s greatest deliberative body and they’ve earned the House’s respect. As it turns out, he did that because Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, had sent him a note asking him to scold Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, one of the House managers, for saying that senators would be covering up for the president’s misdeeds if they refused to call John Bolton to testify.
On Wednesday, other pearl-clutching senators also complained about Nadler’s comments. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told the media she was “very offended” and Josh Hawley of Missouri chimed in, saying that Democrats “managed to alienate senators, attack their own jury” — as if any Republicans in the chamber had seriously been considering voting to call Bolton (or any other witnesses) until Nadler hurt their feelings.
Sure enough, the media dutifully asked every Democrat on Thursday if they would distance themselves from Nadler’s comments, giving the impression to the public that this alleged insult was truly over the top. So far, at least, Democrats have resisted the temptation to do that.
Republicans will obviously be using this tactic going forward, even though anyone can see that the House managers are extremely well-prepared and are making their arguments calmly and professionally. At the end of Thursday’s session, lead manager Adam Schiff gave a powerful closing argument in which he explained why the stakes are so high. It was not histrionic or insolent, but it was a sharp condemnation of the president that the House majority concluded must be removed from office for abusing his power.
Republicans have the delicate sensibilities of upper-class Victorian maidens, apparently. If there’s one thing they simply cannot abide, it’s rudeness. Take, for example, the president they are defending, who tweeted this on Thursday:
You can understand why they become indignant whenever House managers assert that such a dignified statesman might have committed the acts of which he is accused.
This is a game I have written about many times. I call it “The Art of the Hissy Fit,” in which the right uses faux outrage to get the media to press the Democrats to disavow or apologize for something they were perfectly entitled to say or do. Most often, it’s something extremely mild, compared to what Republicans say and do every day.)
Recall this example from a few years back during the financial crisis. When the vote on a bailout failed because then-House Republican leader John Boehner couldn’t hold his caucus together at the last minute, this was the excuse:
House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio said that when Pelosi blamed “the Bush administration’s failed economic policies” for the current economic mess, she “poisoned” the well. Added Republican Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, “There’s a reason that this vote failed — and that is Speaker Pelosi’s speech.”
Needless to say, that was not the real reason.
Those who weren’t calling for the smelling salts over the allegedly outrageous rhetoric of the House managers made a big show of being bored and tired and cranky. Some Republican senators were doing crossword puzzles, making paper airplanes and even using fidget spinners like 11-year-old kids.
This is the behavior of the “world’s greatest deliberative body” that Chief Justice Roberts was going on about the other night?
It is all heading toward exactly what Amanda Marcotte predicted here last week: jury nullification. As she pointed out, historically this was used by all-white juries to acquit white defendants who had committed crimes against blacks in the Jim Crow South. Considering Trump’s history of calling for the death penalty for innocent young black men, a brazenly racist act which he defended as recently as last June in a White House interview, this isn’t much of a stretch.
That’s not just jury nullification. It’s reality nullification.
But in Trumpian fashion, the president has turned that inside out by modeling his defense on the O.J. Simpson trial, even hiring a member of Simpson’s Dream Team for his own, Alan Dershowitz. He’s portraying himself as a victim of a rigged system and his “jurors” are prepared to acquit him on that basis. One of his supporters even said outright, “He is our O.J.”
He is. According to CBS News, the White House has been telling Republican senators, “Vote against the president and your head will be on a pike.”
Trump should consider, however, that while O.J. Simpson was acquitted he lost his reputation anyway. Once people heard what he had done, they couldn’t unhear it, even if they believed that L.A. police had framed a guilty man. Simpson ended up going to prison a few years later for a different crime and now lives a life of ignominy, reminiscing about the good old days with his pal Donald Trump.
Unlike O.J., Trump may not live long enough to see the full destruction of his legacy. But since he brought his children into his mess, they will have to bear the burden for him. The Senate can nullify the Constitution, at least for now. It can’t nullify the truth.
The Dems are a riot. Tonight they admitted that the second article was brought because letting Trump's legal challenges go through the courts wouldn't happen before the election. So, they pretend to be worried about the Constitution but when the executive branch appeals an action of the legislation branch to the judicial branch, they call that an impeachable offense. The Senate should dismiss the second article tomorrow. It's frivolous.
Forty-seven years ago to date, the Supreme Court handed down the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in a move of sweeping judicial activism, legalizing abortion in violation of natural law through a fanciful and fatal reading of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. In a 7-2 vote, the bench decided the clause — “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” — included a “right to privacy” that gave women license to kill their unborn children in the womb.
Now nearly 50 years later, Americans are engaged in a vigorous tug of war over human life. And although the political left and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates endlessly strive to out-progressive each other on abortion policy, a new poll reveals bipartisan support for abortion restrictions.
The latest annual, nationwide Marist/Knights of Columbus poll shows most Americans, 70 percent, desire significant restrictions on abortion, such as limiting it to the first trimester, permitting it only in cases of rape or incest or to save the mother’s life, or prohibiting abortion altogether. In fact, even 47 percent of people who identify as “pro-choice” want some form of these restrictions.
The poll finds most Americans also want to vote for a candidate who supports significant restrictions on abortion, including more than 60 percent of independents, and even 44 percent of Democrats. Eighty percent of survey respondents agree that laws can protect both women and the lives of the unborn, compared to only 14 percent who say laws must choose between protecting one or the other.
2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have repeatedly called for nearly unfettered abortion access, insisting it’s what most Americans want. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s abortion policy proposals include prompting Congress to pass laws establishing an “affirmative and statutory” right to abortion, which would codify Roe v. Wade and prohibit states from enacting restrictions. Warren also supports repealing the Hyde Amendment to expand taxpayer funding of abortion.
“The overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire to return to the world before Roe v. Wade. And so the time to act is now,” Warren said.
When it comes to the courts reconsidering Roe v. Wade, however, the majority of Americans want it reinterpreted.
This public opinion runs directly contrary to the platforms of 2020 Democratic contenders. Former Vice President Joe Biden has flip-flopped throughout his career, most recently on the Hyde Amendment. In June his campaign announced he would support Hyde and less than 48 hours later reversed their position after facing backlash from abortion advocates. According to Politico, Pete Buttigieg supports few if any limits on abortion. In September, Buttigieg tried to justify abortion up until the moment of birth, saying the Bible talks about “how life begins with breath.” Bernie Sanders has even advocated abortion as a means of population control to curb climate change.
As 2020 Democrats continue to move left on issues like abortion, they risk ostracizing the majority of voters who value human life inside and outside the womb.
“Congress should act to ensure that the will of the people remains the law of the land,” Warren said in regard to Roe. The senator might just change her tune if she were honest about what the people’s will actually is.
Make no mistake: Pompeo's meltdown,Trump's rants, the continuous "outrage" of Trump's lawyers, the Kavanaugh screaming - it's all the same trick: using explosive male rage to intimidate people asking smart questions about their crimes.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
Polling for the past several months shows every single Democratic candidate for president handily beating Trump in 2020, most by double digits.
"Make no mistake: Pompeo's meltdown,Trump's rants, the continuous "outrage" of Trump's lawyers, the Kavanaugh screaming - it's all the same trick: using explosive male rage to intimidate people asking smart questions about their crimes."
To be clear: Dems's outrage about Trump's phone call, Biden screaming at reporters, Adam Schiff's acting like the future of country is at stake if a President contests a Congressional subpoena in court - it's all the same trick: to intimidate people asking smart questions about why Joe Biden's son was paid a million a year by a corrupt Ukraine company
the DNC, just like last election which they fixed to make sure Hillary won, is trying to install the bumbling and senile former VP, Joe Biden, as the Dem nominee for President
problem: his family has a nasty habit of trying to sell influence and access with him to the highest bidder
solution: try to create a rationale where it is illegal to even discuss Biden's corruption
problem: America has a constitutional right to free speech so such a thing can't be illegal
solution: make discussing Biden's corruption an impeachable offense
Congratulations, Dems!
you hit the jackpot!!
you found a way to subvert the Constitution and use it for partisan purposes
it's the worst nightmare of the founding fathers
President Trump on Friday became the first president to attend the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., where he delivered a speech. The annual march was as large as always, in contrast to the pathetic Women's March last week, likely reflecting an enthusiasm gap that will help the President get re-elected,
“We’re here for a very simple reason,” the president said to a crowd of hundredss of thousands of anti-abortion activists on the National Mall, “to defend the right of every child born and unborn to fulfill their God-given potential.”
“For 47 years Americans of all backgrounds have traveled across the country to stand for life,” Trump said. “And today as president of the United States I am truly proud to stand with you.”
“All of us here understand an eternal truth: Every child is a precious and sacred gift from God,” the president continued. “Together we must protect, cherish and defend the dignity and sanctity of every human life.”
He added: “Unborn children have never had a stronger defender in the White House.”
It was the first appearance in person by a sitting president at the event, which has been held annually on or around the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion for the last 47 years. Vice President Mike Pence, who was in Rome Friday for a meeting with Pope Francis, in 2017 became the first sitting vice president to attend. Last year, Pence made a surprise appearance, and Trump addressed the crowd by video.
Trump used part of his March for Life address to note that the “far left” is “actively working to erase our God-given rights.”
“They are coming after me because I am fighting for you,” he said.
The president also pointed out that “nearly every top Democrat in Congress now supports taxpayer-funded abortion, all the way up until the moment of birth.”
Earlier this week, Ralph Reed, a longtime advocate for family issues, told Yahoo News that Trump’s appearance is of “massive historical significance.”
“It is a game changer,” Reed said.
Trump's new Space Force logo is seemingly beamed up straight from the Enterprise. The president revealed the official logo for the Space Force in a tweet on Friday, and people were quick to point out its striking resemblance to the iconic logo for Starfleet, the space force for the United Federation of Planets in the "Star Trek" universe.
"After consultation with our Great Military Leaders, designers, and others, I am pleased to present the new logo for the United States Space Force, the Sixth Branch of our Magnificent Military!" Trump tweeted, along with a photo of the new design.
The design has what appears to be Starfleet's delta spaceship symbol at its center, surrounded by the familiar blue globe, white stars and swooshed rings.
The Space Force, the sixth and newest branch of the armed forces created to handle threats in space, was made official last month when Congress passed a $738 billion military bill. Mr. Trump has pushed for its creation throughout his presidency.
Former "Star Trek" cast member George Takei, who is inflicted with homosexuality, was quick to respond to the controversial logo. "Ahem. We are expecting some royalties from this," he tweeted Friday afternoon. CBS, which owns the logo, did not immediately comment.
John Noonan, a former national security adviser and former member of the Air Force, pointed out that the Space Force logo is likely based on a long-standing Air Force Command logo.
In 2018, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee polled voters on their preferred Space Force logo.
Hopefully, the next time future members of the Space Force see Mr. Trump, they'll greet him with a Vulcan salute.
The new series "Star Trek: Picard" on CBS All Access sees the return of Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, the character he made famous almost two decades ago in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The 10-episode series premiered Thursday, with new episodes available each week.
Who else was at the dinner meeting that had authority to fire the Ukrainian ambassador besides Trump? Why didn't he just fire her himself? Why did he need to ask someone to "Take her out"?
If just his henchmen were there and he says "Take her out" I guess she was scheduled for an accident. Timeline question when did Yovanovitch get the call saying "get out of Ukraine"?
He also said "she's gonna go though some things"
There's a critical witness impeachment is missing
Trump's lawyers have "opened the door" to calling an important witness - the president himself.
Confronted by a skilled examiner, Trump would melt down in minutes. He'd be humiliated, and he knows it - which is why he's too terrified to give testimony under oath.
ABC News
BREAKING: "take her out". Recording appears to capture Pres. Trump at private dinner in 2018 saying he wants Ukrainian Amb. Marie Yovanovitch fired.
Trump said Rudy was probably in earshot when he made the "take her out" comment,
suggesting the comment was meant for Rudy.
How does empowering Rudy rather than Lev Parnas make it any better?
... as Rudy was working granting Trump's wishes, Lev was working for Rudy facilitating.
How in the world does @ABC know what Trump meant by "take her out"? We know that he had Ukrainian Oligarch associates surveil her & was ordering them, not people in the State Dept. to "get rid of her." It's absolutely irresponsible to have this as the headline at this point
Earlier Wyatt/Regina posted some passive aggressive one-liners about transgender people.
They're obviously really angry at me and afraid to confront me directly.
Tell everyone at TTF, Wyatt/Regina:
How does me living my life as a woman and having others treat me as a woman harm anyone else?
You said you consider my husband and I two gay men and that you want society to attack relationships like ours.
How are my husband and I better off apart?
"Who else was at the dinner meeting that had authority to fire the Ukrainian ambassador besides Trump? Why didn't he just fire her himself? Why did he need to ask someone to "Take her out"?"
He has the right to fire any ambassador he wants to.
What's going on here is more Dem diversionary tactics.
Just to let you know what this is all covering up: Joe "Electable" Biden's family has been making money off his public offices for years.
Dems want it to be illegal to call him on it
For those of you who don't know, Trump wanted to "get rid of" Ukrainian Ambassador Yovanovitch because she was in charge of Ukrainian policy but she was honest and wouldn't go along with calling for a sham investigation into the Biden's.
Now we have Trump on tape telling his henchmen (who he claimed not to know) to "get rid of her".
This is a man with no boundaries who will take every bit of power he can. If Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate let him do whatever he wants he absolutely will make himself dictator.
it only comes once a year
I hope everyone is ready
Jan. 26 to Feb. 1 is National School Choice Week
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Anonymous government is not the solution to the problem, government is the problem"
When Republicans say this, what they mean is they want to elminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the right to insurance even if you have a pre-existing condition.
" National School Choice Week"
This dog whistle means these people want to eliminate schools paid for by the government and to force everyone to pay to educate their child.
What they want is for the rich to have the best education and for the poor to get none at all.
Ken Starr is a lunatic, Ken Starr is a disaster.
For those of you unfamiliar, Ken Starr is now the head of Trump's legal team during the impeachment trial.
The entire defence consists of "Look over there! Joe Biden!"
If Trump is so innocent, why is Mitch McConnell holding the trial with extra long dasy, starting in the afternoon and going until 2:00 AM?
Because everyone knows Trump is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and Mitch wants to race through the trial without witnesses or evidence to prevent the public from hearing about Trump's crimes.
Trump said if any Republican Senator votes to acquit him he'll have their head on a pike (not at all Hitlerian, is it?).
So the Republican Senators are so offended by the notion that Trump is strong-arming them they are going to go ahead and vote exactly the way he wants and commit a cover-up.
As Trump's lawyers Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz said, "You don't have to have committed a crime to be removed from office. If you've completely corrupted the office you must be removed from power".
But just for the record, here's a few of the laws Trump has broken:
52 U.S.C. 30121 Solicitation of Foreign Influence
18 U.S.C. 201; U.S. Con. Art II 4 Bribery
18 U.S.C. 641 Misappropriation of Funds
18 U.S.C. 371 Conspiracy
18 U.S. C. 1343, 1346 Honest Services Fraud
18 U.S. C 1512 Witness Tampering
18 U.S.C. 610 Coercion of Political Activity
18 U.S.C. 1501=1521, Obstruction of Justice
Everyone is missing the most damning point here. Trump recently spent three minutes on camera denying ever knowing this guy....At all. Now an audio clip surfaces of a private dinner with this guy and him ordering the guy...that he does not know, to “take out” a US ambassador. He lied. His defense is one big lie. He is a serial liar.
If Ukrainian Ambassador Yovanovitch were to have been replaced in the normal above-board way, a new Ambassador would need to be appointed, then confirmed by the Senate. That process would allow Senators to ask for documents regarding the appointment, including documents (and testimony), as to why she needed to be replaced. She has a solid record of service and was well-respected in the diplomatic community. Because Trump and his mob were running a corrupt scheme, they couldn't take that chance. If they refused to produce the documents for a routine appointment, even more questions would be asked. That they could not allow.
In his twisted psyche, don the con fancies himself as some sort of mafia
don or godfather, no doubt nurtured by his father's mob connections,
Roy Cohn's toxic influence and Ghouliani's knowledge of the inner
workings of mob families. He used the mob vernacular of "Take her out"
when referring to Marie Yavonavitch. Aside from it being a matter for
the State Dept. to merely fire her, his faux macho posturing suggests he
wants her killed and he's giving permission to "fixers and henchmen"
that he supposedly "doesn't know" to do whatever necessary to eliminate
her. In historical mob fashion, he is now tampering with the jury by telling them he will have their "head on a pike" if they don't acquit him.
Trump, and his cult, will insist that there was nothing sinister on these remarks.
I know that when I'm in charge and I want to fire someone, I don't just do it myself, nor do I talk to that person's immediate superior. No. I go to some random mob associated individuals and speak in euphemisms often associated with the act of murder.
Doesn't everyone?
Today, Managers for the U.S. House of Representatives filed a 28,578-page trial record with the Secretary of the Senate for the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. The trial record serves as the evidentiary foundation informing the Senate impeachment trial and provides a permanent accounting to the Senate and the public of the evidence gathered against the President of the United States.
This record does not include thousands of documents and witness testimony that President Trump is blocking from Congress and the American people.
The record delivered today presents a mountain of evidence showing the President has committed the impeachable offenses that the House has charged – Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress – and he should be removed from office. The factual and legal record laid out by the House Managers has yet to be substantively rebutted by President Trump or his lawyers, who have instead sought to hide behind novel and frivolous legal theories.
In addition to the public trial record filed today, the House Managers also previously filed with the Secretary of the Senate a non-public classified document which was admitted into evidence and has been made available to Senators for consideration during trial.
"He lied. His defense is one big lie. He is a serial liar."
that's only a problem when Trump does
it's still possible he's not lying
not so, with Adam Schiff, who spent the week telling purty lies to the Senate
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "it's still possible Trump's not lying"
The guy who's told 15,000 lies since hes' been in office? The guy who is averaging ten lies a day, him, its "possible he's not lying"??
If Trump isn't lying why doesn't he release all the documents he unconstitutionally refused to provide to Congress?
If Trump isn't lying why doesn't he allow the people who were witnesses to his behavior testify at his trial?
If Trump's "not lying" all those documents and witnesses will provide the exculpatory evidence that proves it.
So, why are Republicans trying to keep all witnesses and documents out of the trial if Trump's "not lying"?
The truth is that we all know he's lying. Unfortunately at this time Republicans like Susan Collins won't admit it.
Adam Schiff brought up that Trump told Republican Senators that if they vote against him he'll have their heads on a pike.
Showing her poor judgement and bias Senator LIsa Murkowski said of her upcoming vote in the trial "That's where he lost me."
Lisa took an oath to be an impartial juror. Her comment shows she is not willing to be an impartial juror. An impartial juror would never base their vote on whether or not she found the prosecution to be polite and tactful. An impartial juror would look at the evidence, hear the witnesses and make her decision based on that, not on whether or not she felt the relevant truth was insulting.
Lisa Murkowski's comment shows she does not intend to do her part to make this a fair trial.
An impartial juror would look at Trump's threat for what it is - a further strike against his credibility and the criminal act of jury tampering.
Dems are very nervous
they should be
they just spent the week repeating an unlikely case against the President
I had been assuming that Trump actually did conduct a quid pro quo but that it didn't rise to an unimpeachable offense
after listening to Schiff & gang's "proof", I don't see any evidence
it's all hearsay
and the witnesses even admit they are just making assumptions
what are vulnerable Dems, like the guy from Colorado, going to tell voters about all this time they wasted?
their big achievement was approving Trump's new North American trade deal
the House didn't flip during Nixon's and Reagan's landslide
it may during Trump's
Adam Schiff, and the rest of his gang, have been saying they have overwhelming evidence that the President tried to blackmail the President of Ukraine
why did they repeat the same things over and over again this week?
to make it appear there was a lot of evidence when there was actually a bunch of hearsay and assumptions from people without firsthand knowledge
why do they desperately want more witnesses?
because their evidence is not overwhelming
in two hours, the President's team shredded a case the Dems used days to make
this will be over soon
unfortunately, we'll have to wait until November to let voters send this message to the Dems:
get a new job
Long before Democrats finished making their marathon impeachment case Friday night, momentum had deserted them. The loops of repetition had gone from annoying to unbearable and the wild assertions got even wilder as their talk, talk, talk became a trial of its own.
Despite the historic nature of the event, the public voted by staying away. Many gallery seats sat empty, a fact that recalls a gem from the late Yogi Berra that “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them.”
Still, even a fraudulent impeachment is not a laughing matter and until the Senate votes, nothing is guaranteed. To that end, President Trump’s team finally got their first turn at bat Saturday and delivered several big hits in a strong start.
They began with something Trump has said repeatedly: “Read the transcript and you’ll see exactly what it is.”
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, echoed that view when he told senators the transcript of the president’s call with the president of Ukraine on July 25th “is the best evidence” that Trump “did absolutely nothing wrong.”
He cited passage after passage in the transcript that undercut the Dems’ charge of a quid pro quo involving American military aid in exchange for investigations into Ukraine’s role in the 2016 presidential election and Hunter Biden’s lucrative gig with a corrupt energy company.
After reading each passage, including those on the need to combat corruption in Ukraine and the presidents’ agreement that Germany and France should pony up more aid, Cipollone noted that Dems did not mention any of those in their presentation. He accused them of hiding evidence that didn’t fit their “predetermined outcome” and of trying to pull off “the most massive interference in election history.”
He returned to that point in his team’s final remarks, saying this impeachment amounts to interfering in this year’s election “by removing the President of the United States from the ballot.”
Doing that, he said, is the true “abuse of power” that violates the Founders’ intent.
It was a clear argument and Cipollone was followed by three more Trump lawyers who stuck to his theme — go on offense and put the motive and conduct of the impeachers on trial.
The aim wasn’t just to create reasonable doubt. The goal was to demolish the entire case against the president and expose lead prosecutor Rep. Adam Schiff and Speaker Nancy Pelosi as pure partisans trying to overturn the 2016 election and steal the next one.
Some of the defense’s effort involved a meticulous reading of witness transcripts and comparing them to what Dems had said about those witnesses. And some of it was a much more casual effort at drawing contrasts. One of those contrasts simply involved time.
Saturday’s session lasted just two hours, yet it was effective in part because it was concise. The fact that the president’s team would be brief in their first at-bat and not use the full 24 hours allotted them in coming days clearly was aimed at reminding the senators and the viewing public of how Dems erred in making the trial a test of endurance.
Another contrast was that the president’s team would not insult the senators. Cipollone cited two Dem examples, the first with Rep. Jerry Nadler’s foolish charge that a vote against additional witnesses would amount to a “cover-up” of crimes and a “treacherous” decision.
The second insult was Schiff’s reference to a threat allegedly made by the White House that any defecting GOP senator would find that “your head will be on a pike.”
It’s telling that while Schiff said he wasn’t sure the CBS story was true, he used it anyway, which forced the White House and senators to deny it. “I know of no Republican senator who has been threatened in any way by anyone in the administration,” said Susan Collins of Maine, whose vote might be in play. Another, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, said Schiff “lost me” with the comment.
edit: I originally thought this was Susan Collins and then told it was LIsa Murkowski. Now it is apparently Susan Collins again.
Adam Schiff brought up that Trump told Republican Senators that if they vote against him he'll have their heads on a pike.
Showing her poor judgment and bias Senator Lisa Susan Collins said of her upcoming vote in the trial "That's where he lost me."
Susan took an oath to be an impartial juror. Her comment shows she is not willing to be an impartial juror. An impartial juror would never base their vote on whether or not she found the prosecution to be polite and tactful. An impartial juror would look at the evidence, hear the witnesses and make her decision based on that, not on whether or not she felt the relevant truth was insulting.
Susan Collin's comment shows she does not intend to do her part to make this a fair trial.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "transgender-ism is sexist and anti-woman"
Oh, really? In what way am I hurting any woman (or man) by living as a woman and having people treat me as a woman?
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "why did they repeat the same things over and over again this week?"
Because they don't believe Republicans will fulfill their oath to be impartial jurors. Because Mitch McConnell made the trial rules to rush this through as fast as possible and keep the public from hearing about Trump's corruption. McConnell required extra long days going late into the night to keep this out of the public eye and minimize the number of days this goes on. If Trump is innocent, what's the rush? So their was repetition because Democrats figure perhaps the only audience that will matter is the public so they repeat to get different audiences in the country the opportunity to see the entire complaint against Trump.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "[there was repetition of the manager's case against trump] to make it appear there was a lot of evidence when there was actually a bunch of hearsay and assumptions from people without firsthand knowledge why do they desperately want more witnesses?"
It is Republicans who are keeping the trial from hearing from first hand witnesses!
You can't have it both ways, you can't refuse to let first hand witnesses testify and then also say the case isn't proven because Democrats haven't presented any first hand witnesses at trial. If you honestly think the case isn't proven without first hand witnesses then for f's sake let them testify!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "why do they desperately want more witnesses? because their evidence is not overwhelming"
"more" witnesses? Republicans haven't allowed any!
You just made the Democrats' case for more witnesses by admitting with witnesses there'd be more evidence of Trump's guilt - "their case is not overwhelming without witnesses", you said. So if you honestly believe that then you Republicans must live up to the oath you took to be impartial jurors by calling first hand witnesses.
Trump's lawyers tried to dishonestly paint his bribery of the Ukrainian president as a "policy disagreement".
What policy disagreement, pray tell?
Does Trump disagree with the long standing U.S. policy that Russia is America's #1 global adversary?
Does Trump disagree with the long standing U.S. policy that it is allied with NATO?
If this is a "policy disagreement", why doesn't Trump be up front about it that he wants the United States to make Russia its friend and NATO its enemy?
The truth is, this has nothing to do with the absurd claim that this is a "policy disagreement".
The truth is that Trump used congressionally approved taxpayer funds to try to coerce the Ukrainian government into helping Trump deceive the American public and take away their right to choose a president other than him.
If you vote to acquit him, history may remember you as one of the people who brought down the American democracy.
Here's a test for Republican Senators. If you think it is unfair to suggest the Presidetn gleefully seeks scorched-earth retribution against his critics, go on Fox News and say you want to see the documents and hear from witnesses. Then go check Twitter.
Any Republicans who acquit Trump, sayin' "we'll let the people decide in November", the "people" they mean is Russian intelligence.
He doesn't have the essential patriotism God gave a snail. He pledges allegiance to his donors, and they get what they want. He's selling out his country, and he's doing it in real-time and out in the open. This is worse than McCarthy or McCarran ever were.
Mitch McConnell is the thief of the nation's soul.
Is there a law against boring people to death? There should be, and Adam Schiff should be the first indicted.
As the California representative has tried to convince Americans — again — that Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office, he has stultified not only TV audiences across the nation but also the senators who by law have to pay attention to him. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.
It is hard to imagine that such a profound undertaking — the overturning of an American election — could emerge as such a dramatic dud. But it has, and the reason is simple. Schiff orchestrated the impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives in such a way as to render the partisan outcome predictable and undermined his own effectiveness by leaking every interesting snippet that was damaging to the president.
Schiff presided over secret committee hearings in rooms closed off to the press and the country, only popping his head up from time to time like a jack-in-the-box to rip the president for trying to find out what the heck Hunter Biden was doing in Ukraine.
And trying to determine whether the corrupt country had intervened in our elections. That possibility is roundly rejected by the left-wing chorus as “widely discredited”; in fact, that aggressive dismissal makes me wonder. When Democrats read in unison from a script, there’s usually a reason.
By the time the full House and the country got to hear the charges against the president, during endless hours of debate, most Americans had already heard the flimsy facts of the case and were becoming less impressed by the day. Schiff had scooped his own story.
Now we’re at it again. Those who have spent recent months trekking in Antarctica may be engrossed in Schiff’s rerun; most of us are not.
Pity the senators in the chamber, who have doubtless kept up to date on the impeachment effort. News accounts tell of them snatching surreptitious cat naps and trying to sneak chewing tobacco onto the floor to relieve the boredom. Who can blame them?
In response to those twitchy senators, Schiff and Jerrold Nadler have amped up the hysteria, trying to convince the country that President Trump’s delay of aid to Ukraine endangered our national security or is putting the 2020 election in jeopardy. Both charges may have brought some insensate senators back to consciousness, but neither is true.
If you are a Democrat, you cannot be happy with the impeachment process to date. Your leader, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has vacillated between spiteful and foolish (those signature pens! That parade!), and your emissaries appear simply inept.
More important, you have not changed minds. Notwithstanding the endless hours spent vilifying President Trump, Gallup puts his approval ratings at an all-time high. Moreover, his admirers are so incensed that he and his party have hauled in an unprecedented amount of campaign money.
Swing-state voters appear indifferent at best to Democrats’ push to impeach; some polls show them angry that so much of the nation’s time and effort has gone into attacking a president they voted for.
This is what Democrats have overlooked. The best way to turn around those blue-collar workers who defected to Trump in 2016 is probably not to tell them they were stupid to have voted for him in the first place; instead, Democrats need to convince Americans that they have a better plan forward.
Sen Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or former Vice President Joe Biden or whoever the nominee turns out to be needs to impress voters with how they are going to create more jobs, raise wages further or improve their health care options. Those conversations are being drowned out by the furor over Trump withholding for a few months aid to Ukraine that President Obama refused to give them in the first place.
It is said that establishment Democrats favor Biden to represent them in November. Some have charged that Pelosi’s still-puzzling decision to sit on the House’s articles of impeachment for a month was meant to help Biden by locking down progressive candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.
Did not anyone on the Democratic team ever consider that every single one of the tens of thousands of stories written or broadcast about Ukraine would link Joe Biden and his druggie son to talk of corruption?
It was a foregone conclusion that during the Senate trial, as Minority Leader Charles Schumer bleats about the need for witnesses and scorns Republicans for a “cover-up,” GOP senators would agree to entertain former national security adviser John Bolton in exchange for hearing from Hunter and Joe Biden. That request has embarrassed the former veep, putting him on the defensive, but it seems reasonable. If Trump argues that he asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky for an investigation to ferret out corruption in that country, we should know if Hunter Biden’s activities were corrupt. End of story.
It is hard to see what Democrats have gained by putting the country through an increasingly ugly impeachment process. They have aroused their base, perhaps, but they have also ignited fury among Trump supporters. And Democrats have undermined Joe Biden, a candidate many thought had the best chance of beating President Trump.
Worse, Pelosi and Schiff and their colleagues have so profoundly lowered the bar for impeachment that future presidents will forever risk that ultimate rebuke, rendering the U.S. less stable. The brilliant founders of this country anticipated the possibility of mob rule in the House by mandating a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict. Thank heavens for their foresight.
Pelosi is crowing that Trump will be impeached “forever.” Because of her unforgivable cave to the radical Left, Trump will likely have plenty of company, and history will hold her accountable —
forever.
Dems need to apologize to America for nominating Hillary in 2016.
Remember when Jimmy Carter published a whiny, self-serving book about his political downfall called “What Happened”?
Remember when Mike Dukakis pushed filmmakers to do a four-hour fan documentary about himself?
Remember when George H.W. Bush mocked Bill Clinton at the Grammys?
Yeah, me neither.
Previous losing presidential candidates had the dignity to back off and bow out of politics.
Yet here is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the recurrent canker sore on America’s butt.
This week she again tried to reintroduce herself to us all as anything but what she is, which is a sore loser.
Her attempts to scramble back into the political spotlight after the American people booed her off the stage have been so pathetic that she resorted to calling Army major and Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard “a Russian asset” — a loony insult that this week got Clinton socked with a lawsuit for defamation.
How funny would it be if Hillary were forced to transfer a chunk of her filthy fortune to Tulsi?
This week, to promote the upcoming four-hour Sundance/Hulu documentary “Hillary,” a project launched by Hillary herself, Clinton gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter in which she turned on one of her party’s two front-runners for the presidential race, proving yet again that God sent Hillary Rodham Clinton to earth as a beautiful gift to the Republican Party.
What could be more delightful than to hear Rotten Rodham pelt Bernie Sanders with her sour grapes?
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done,” Clinton said in the film, sticking by the remarks in the interview.
“He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.”
Career politician? Sanders drives a 2010 Chevy subcompact. The car he drove in the 1980s, when he was mayor of Burlington, was so pathetic it was once nearly ticketed by a meter maid who, when she saw it parked in the space reserved for the mayor, couldn’t believe any mayor would ever drive such a thing.
Hillary Clinton is far worse than a “career politician” — she’s a kleptocrat who got rich selling access to herself to lobbyists and foreigners. Bernie may be barmy but he is not for sale and he never made any money to speak of until his book “Our Revolution” became a hit in 2016.
As for the “nobody likes him,” honey, that’s like your husband calling Mitt Romney a skirt chaser.
In the interview Hillary wouldn’t even commit to backing Bernie in the general election, should he be the Democrats’ pick.
What the fudge, Madam Pantsuit? Haven’t you been saying President Trump is a dire threat to democracy?
Yet when asked whether she’d support Sanders over Trump, she said, “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season,” then hinted that she might withhold her endorsement because of the Bernie Bros.
Some of Bernie’s Twitter trolls are such a nuisance that she’s not sure she can endorse Sanders over Trump?
If there is any doubt whatsoever in her mind about whether to back Sanders after he becomes the nominee, this reduces to rubble any future statements she may make that Trump is uniquely unfit or uniquely dangerous for office. Her petty feud with Team Sanders makes it clear that her differences with Trump are equally petty, and derived from the same source: her embarrassment about how badly she did against these two long-shot outsiders.
So keep talking, Hillary.
You’re the Republican Party’s most valuable spokesperson.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem"
When Republicans say this, what they mean is that they want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and to take away people's right to health insurance when they have pre-existing health conditions.
Banning abortion is sexist and anti-woman.
Trump used $400 million in taxpayer funds for his personal gain by trying to extort the Ukrainian President into announcing fake investigations into the Bidens.
That's what happens in banana republics, the dictator uses government to attack people running against him.
Yet another think tank has downgraded the U.S.'s level of democracy
Democracy index (by @TheEIU)
1 Norway
2 Iceland
3 Sweden
4 N Zealand
7 Canada
9 Austrailia
14 UK
20 France
25 U.S. (categorized as "flawed democracy")
27 Estonia
39 Greece
51 India
78 Ukraine
110 Turkey
134 Russia
159 S Arabia
167 N Korea
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "So glad we have an electoral college system. Without it, the nuts in California might dictate to and tyrannize the rest of the country."
The electoral college system is anti-democratic. It makes votes in conservative states worth more than votes in moderate states.
3 million more people voted for Hillary than Trump. The electoral college overrules the will of the people.
The electoral college lets minority conservative states dictate to and tyrannize the majority of the country. That's why Trump is threatening to put his oppositions' heads on pikes.
Good anonymous said ""Trump's dementia is what Claire McCaskill is describing. She emphasizes how the entire Senate knows he's imparied. Enabling him to stay in the WH while deteriorating from dementia will become one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Dems and the media constantly said the same about Reagan."
So, you admit Trump has dementia just like Reagan. That's a start on your road to reformation. Its no secret that Reagan wasn't all there.
The trouble with Trump's dementia is that he doesn't have have honest people around him running the show for him like Regan did.
Reagan had an innocuous dementia, he wasn't determined to become dictator and terrorize all those who oppose him. Reagan didn't break the law by inviting foreign powers to rid elections for him.
Claire McCaskill says on MSNBC that Republican Senators have told her that Trump doesn't know what he is talking about.
While she doesn't say the word, Trump's dementia is what Claire McCaskill is describing. She emphasizes how the entire Senate knows he's impaired. Enabling him to stay in the WH while deteriorating from dementia will become one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history.
90,000 documents for a Democrat lying about a consensual sex act.
0 documents for a Republican bribing a foreign country to cheat in *another* election.
#GOPCoverup
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Is there a law against boring people to death? There should be, and Adam Schiff should be the first indicted."
A trial is not about entertaining jurors, its about a search for the truth.
Republican senators took an oath to do impartial justice. The oath does not say "Do impartial justice unless you're bored".
Republicans job is to look for the truth, not to seek entertainment.
What a sad state the United States has come to when Republicans use this as an excuse to avoid doing the jobs they were elected to do.
When you can't refute the facts made by the prosecution all you're left with is complaining that they were "boring".
Trump's guilty of extortion for his personal gain.
Trump uses the government as an extension of himself to benefit himself at the expense of the American people.
Who's side is Trump on, Russia or NATO?
U.S. health system costs four times more to run than Canada’s single-payer system
In the United States, a legion of administrative healthcare workers and health insurance employees who play no direct role in providing patient care costs every American man, woman and child an average of $2,497 per year.
Across the border in Canada, where a single-payer system has been in place since 1962, the cost of administering healthcare is just $551 per person — less than a quarter as much.
100 million Americans have pre-existing health conditions. Obamacare gives these Americans the right to health insurance at no additional charge despite their pre-existing conditions.
Republicans are fighting tooth and nail in court to take away the right to health care insurance for those with pre-existing conditions.
Mitch McConnell stated before the trial started that he would not be an impartial juror.
He's rushed it through in the dead of night to keep the American public from hearing about Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors, the complete corruption of the office of the president.
This entire trial is a sham until Mitch McConnell recuses himself.
All this on the backdrop of Facebook's corrupt Mark Zuckerberg who announced he would let Republicans lie in Facebook ads because "I think the public should hear what politicians are saying".
Mark, you are a disgrace to democracy.
How is it in the interests of the public good for them to hear lies?
Admit it Mark, its only in the interests of the Republican party that you allow them to deceive the public on Facebook. You, Putin, Trump, and Mitch McConnell, working tirelessly to take away the ability of the American people to freely choose a president other than Trump.
Leaks are still dripping!
Sunday night we got this New York Times bombshell:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/us/politics/trump-bolton-book-ukraine.html
President Trump told his national security adviser in August that he wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens, according to an unpublished manuscript by the former adviser, John R. Bolton. …
Over dozens of pages, Mr. Bolton described how the Ukraine affair unfolded over several months until he departed the White House in September. He described not only the president’s private disparagement of Ukraine but also new details about senior cabinet officials who have publicly tried to sidestep involvement.
We don’t know how this manuscript came into the New York Times’ hands, but the paper claims that Bolton shared drafts with close associates and delivered one to the White House to determine whether it contains classified information as is usual practice. While the motive behind leaking it is unclear, it stands to reason that Bolton may have feared that the White House would withhold the book on national security grounds.
Donald Trump has strong-armed senators into covering up for his crimes altogether, rather than allowing them to simply say that what he did was wrong, but he hadn’t committed an impeachable offense. He won’t stand for anyone saying he isn’t perfect. So they must all agree to be his accomplices.
Those senators may have been tossing and turning on Sunday night, however. In just the last three days, recordings have come to light that show Trump has been lying about knowing Parnas and Fruman, and now Bolton’s book testifying to Trump’s personal involvement has been leaked. Every day there’s something new. They have to be wondering how much more they will be forced to answer for next November.
After Trump’s Acquittal, It Will Only Get Worse for Republicans
The Senate trial of President Donald Trump is proving less Soviet than expected. Representative Adam Schiff of California, the House impeachment manager, last week presented a coherent, damning and often eloquent narrative of Trump’s guilt, backed by text messages, emails, letters and sworn witness testimony previously delivered to the House.
As my colleague Jonathan Bernstein points out, the weight of such facts can alter political gravity. Even Republicans who have made up their minds to acquit — which almost certainly describes the entire GOP caucus — have had to sit through the avalanche of evidence. Surely it weighs on at least a few consciences. Meanwhile, writes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, ignoring the facts carries risks of its own: “The impeachment trial is an exercise in displaying the Republican Party’s institutional culpability in Trump’s contempt for the rule of law. At some point, they will have to decide to damn the president or to damn themselves.”
It’s a foregone conclusion: Republican senators will damn themselves to infinity and beyond. The question isn’t what Republican senators will decide next week, but where the Republican Party will go after Trump’s acquittal. That answer, too, is alarmingly clear: further downward. From 1994 to 2015, give or take, the party was tumbling down a slippery slope. Since 2016, Republicans have been falling at 32 feet per second squared.
Acquitting Trump is not the same as shrugging at the president’s venality and vindictiveness, or mumbling and walking away when a reporter asks whether you believe it’s OK to solicit foreign sabotage of a U.S. election. Acquitting Trump is a bold, affirmative act.
The acquittal will mark the senators as political made men. It will be their induction into Trump’s gangster ethos, using constitutional powers to enable corruption. For those who have hovered on the periphery of Trump’s political gangland, there is no route back to innocence.
Many long ago crossed that Rubicon, proclaiming their fealty to “the chosen one.” But acquittal will transform even the most reticent Republicans into conspirators against democracy and rule of law.
It will not be long before they are called upon to defend the indefensible again. And they will do it, acquiescing to the next figurative or literal crime just as they did to Trump’s videotaped boast of sexual assaults, his horrifying sellouts to Russian President Vladimir Putin, his personal use of charitable contributions intended for veterans, his brutality toward children, or his quotidian blitzes against decency and democracy.
Schiff’s repeated use of the word “cheat” to describe Trump’s posture toward U.S. elections was less an accounting of past performance than a guarantee of future results. “No one is really making the argument, ‘Donald Trump would never do such a thing,’ because of course we know that he would, and of course we know that he did,” Schiff told the Senate last week. “He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.”
Whether the game is golf or politics or business, Trump cheats. On trial for seeking foreign interference in the 2020 election, after having been the beneficiary of foreign interference in the 2016 election, Trump will find many willing accomplices before November. His presidency is a strategic boon to multiple U.S. adversaries, most prominently Putin. Another modest investment in Trump’s presidency could yield an even larger return — destroying, for a generation or more, American democracy not only as a vehicle of ethical government but also as a protector (aspirationally if not always actually) of human dignity.
This is not cynicism. It’s the reality of U.S. politics in 2020. Acquitting Trump will destroy what’s left of the Republican Party’s claims to ethical legitimacy and pave the way for the further erosion of democracy. The only question that remains is how much more corruption the non-MAGA majority of Americans is willing to take.
There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the President's defence and therefore must be called as a witness a the impeachment trial of President Trump.
Ambassador Bolton reportedly heard directly from Trump that aid for Ukraine was tied to political investigations.
The refusal of the Senate to call for him, other relevant witnesses, and documents is even now more indefencible.
The choice is clear: our Constitution, or a cover-up
funny how the longer the impeachment goes on, the higher Trump's approval rating gets
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html
"funny how the longer the impeachment goes on, the higher Trump's approval rating gets"
that's so sad
considering ow hard the Dems tried to defame and demagogue
yet the voters see right through it
you hate to see so much effort come to nothing
Lol, leave it to Wyatt/Regina to brag about an approval rating that's far underwater.
A much greater percentage of the population wants Trump removed from office than approves of the job he's doing.
Over 70% of the public wants witnesses at Trump's trial. Moscow Mitch said he would break his oath and not be an impartial juror.
This entire trial is a sham as long as Mitch McConnell refuses to recuse himself.
Trump is the first president in history to have never had a positive approval rating.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous, you said the case for removal is underwhelming because there haven't been any first hand witnesses. That being the case let's hear you demand that Mitch McConnell call first hand witnesses John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney.
You don't get to claim on one hand the evidence isn't sufficient without first hand witnesses and then on the other BLOCK first hand witnesses from testifying.
Franklin Graham said “I’m not coming to the UK to speak against anybody, I’m coming to speak for everybody. The Gospel is inclusive. I’m not coming out of hate, I’m coming out of love.”
When you believe an entire group of people should be eternally tortured for not agreeing with you, your claim that you love them has no credibility. Franklin Graham undeniably hates gays.
t’s over.
Although there is still more to hear from White House lawyers this week, their short presentation on Saturday made clear that the House impeachment case is a loser.
The House managers’ argument is simple.
It alleges that President Trump withheld military assistance from Ukraine in order to force that country’s new president to investigate — among other things — why and how former Vice President Biden’s son became a director of a corrupt Ukrainian energy company. A subsidiary argument is that Trump also refused to provide, for the same reason, a White House meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky. In withholding the assistance and the meeting, the House managers argue, Trump used the power of the U.S. government for his own political purposes — a corrupt act that they claim warrants his impeachment.
The president’s lawyers, however, in their short two-hour summary of what they will say this week in more detail, fatally undermined this case.
They began with the famous July 25 transcript that recorded a conversation that day between the two leaders.
In the transcript, as the lawyers pointed out, neither Trump nor Zelensky made any reference to the military equipment for Ukraine that Trump was allegedly using to pressure his counterpart. (Zelensky did mention that Ukraine was “almost ready” to buy more Javelin anti-tank weapons, but they were not part of the withheld assistance.)
Even more important, there is nothing in the transcript that suggests Zelensky was aware — at least on July 25 -- that anything was being withheld from Ukraine.
Obviously, Trump could not be pressuring Zelensky by holding back military assistance if the latter was not aware of it. This is a fatal flaw in the House managers’ argument.
The president’s lawyers then produced strong circumstantial evidence that officials in Ukraine were not aware, until Aug. 28, that anything was being withheld.
Through the rest of July and almost all of August, U.S. officials who would regularly hear from their Ukrainian counterparts heard nothing about the military assistance.
But on Aug. 28, Politico published an article saying that Trump was withholding aid.
This immediately set off a storm of calls from officials in Ukraine to their U.S. counterparts, showing that Ukrainian officials had been unaware that anything was being delayed.
Again, if those officials had been in the dark, Trump could not have been using withheld aid to force Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.
In addition, the president’s lawyers also showed that withholding of a White House meeting was also not being used to pressure Zelensky.
In the transcript of the July 25 conversation, Zelensky says, “I am very hopeful for a future meeting,” and the House managers have argued that his eagerness to get such a meeting was another part of Trump’s alleged pressure campaign.
However, shortly after his statement about a meeting with Trump, Zelensky says, “On the other hand, I believe that on September 1 we will be in Poland and we can meet in Poland hopefully.”
Thus, if he was perfectly satisfied to meet in Poland and not in Washington, the House managers’ claim that Zelensky was pressing for a White House meeting was clearly false.
Finally, the president’s lawyers showed, by quoting from the July 25 transcript, that Trump was genuinely concerned about the failure of our European partners to share the burden of protecting Ukraine, a concern that Zelensky echoed.
This countered the House’s charge that burden-sharing was just a post hoc excuse for failing to promptly deliver the assistance.
Similarly, by showing that the president withheld aid funds to other countries when he was concerned that corruption or other factors would waste U.S. taxpayers’ money, the White House lawyers demonstrated that Ukraine was not an exception.
The outlines of a defeat for the House managers were obvious in the two-hour presentation on Saturday morning.
What’s left for Senate Democrats is an attempt to get 51 votes for additional witnesses.
But it’s a fool’s errand.
Now circulating in the media is a story about a book by John Bolton in which he allegedly says the president directed him to hold up delivery of the assistance until Biden was investigated.
The president no doubt says many things to many people that he trusts.
But all these statements of intention are irrelevant if he never told the Ukrainians that the assistance was being withheld.
Without such knowledge, President Zelensky was not being pressured.
Once it is clear that that Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials did not know until the end of August that any armaments were being withheld, there is no longer any basis for claiming that Trump was applying pressure — no matter what Trump might have been discussing with his top aides.
The difference between a trial and a cover up is that trials have witnesses and evidence and coverups don't.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "They began with the famous July 25 transcript that recorded a conversation that day between the two leaders."
There was no transcript. All Trump did was release his rough notes on the call. What all transpired in the conversation we can't know because Trump and the Republicans have blocked people who were there from testifying.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "In the rough notes, as the lawyers pointed out, neither Trump nor Zelensky made any reference to the military equipment for Ukraine that Trump was allegedly using to pressure his counterpart. (Zelensky did mention that Ukraine was “almost ready” to buy more Javelin anti-tank weapons, but they were not part of the withheld assistance.)
More lies. Zelensky asked Trump when the aid he expected to receive was coming and Trump said "I need a favour first" and then went on to ask for fake investigations into the Bidens.
Trump hadn't put his illegal block on the aid before the call, he did so 90 minutes after he hung up the phone from Zelensky.
Remember, the General Accounting Office says Trump's hold on the desperately needed military aid broke the law.
everything's going Trump's way
never liked the guy but the way he drives liberals mad is worth it all
his lawyers decimated the lying Adm Schiff's case today
the Chief Justice got to leave early to celebrate his birthday because the GOP didn't take days repeating the same insufficient evidence over and again
next Monday, it's the Iowa voting where the most most beatable Dem of all, the Bern, is favored to win
Tuesday, it's the State of the Union speech, where Trump will review his substantial achievements made while the Dems wasted time on their witch hunts
to be fair, the Dems do have one major accomplishment: they passed Trump's North American trade agreement
ROFL and LOL!!!
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), who has been running away from reporters and voters who dare ask whether she objects to using U.S. aid to extort a foreign government to interfere in our election, let the cat out of the bag. During a brief media availability on Monday, she rightly declared that the Iowa caucuses are set for next Monday. She then stepped into the political quicksand, confessing that she was “really interested to see how this discussion today informs and influences the Iowa caucus voters, those Democratic caucus goers. Will they be supporting VP Biden at this point?” Oops.
She is not supposed to be cheering in public for Biden’s demise as a result of already debunked conspiracy theories. Her confession however, like then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) letting on that the Benghazi hearings would bring down Hillary Clinton’s favorability numbers, reminds this that the Trump extortion plan and the defense his legal team is conducting are very much — make that entirely — about undermining a rival who he became convinced would be his most dangerous opponent.
The Biden camp was all too happy to point out Ernst’s accidental confession:
Andrew Bates
✔
@AndrewBatesNC
Thank you for reminding us who you're terrified of @realDonaldTrump having to run against. https://twitter.com/alanhe/status/1221948034004799488 …
In a written statement rebutting Trump’s lawyers, the Biden campaign also declared, “Here on Planet Earth, the conspiracy theory that [Trump lawyer Pam] Bondi repeated has been conclusively refuted.” The statement continued, “The New York Times calls it ‘debunked,’ The Wall Street Journal calls it ‘discredited,’ the AP calls it ‘incorrect,’ and The Washington Post Fact Checker calls it ‘a fountain of falsehoods.’ The diplomat that Trump himself appointed to lead his Ukraine policy has blasted it as ‘self-serving’ and ‘not credible.’ ” The statement concluded, "Joe Biden was instrumental to a bipartisan and international anti-corruption victory. It’s no surprise that such a thing is anathema to President Trump.”
Rump's greatest fear: General Election: Trump vs. Biden RCP Average (12/4/19 - 1/23/20) -- Biden +4.3
Rhe next step in the impeachment of the president needs to be considered in both its legal and political aspects.
The legal issue is easily determined, is evident from the first few days of proceedings, and remains a foregone conclusion.
It was obvious from the endlessly repetitive and absurdly overstated arguments of the House managers, Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) in particular, that they had no legal case.
There was no evidence that the president committed a high crime or misdemeanor as the Constitution requires for a president to be removed from office in such a proceeding.
What was alleged was not anything that could be so described, and they fell far short of proof that what they alleged even occurred.
They tried to mislead the Senate and the public by splicing quotes, quoting previous witnesses out of context, and immersing their turgid presentation in a vast, confected odium that they try to spread over the president and his reputation like a lethal gas.
Underscoring their incandescent hatred of the president, Schiff acknowledged that Trump must be removed now to prevent his reelection, that an unnamed source had been cited by CBS who alleged Trump had told Republican senators that if they deserted him their heads would be put on pikes. Nadler accused any Republican voting to acquit the president of “treachery” and of participation in the (inevitable) “cover-up” of Trump’s crimes: again, no evidence of any probative value was adduced that he had committed the acts objected to, which were, in any case, not illegal.
Chief Justice John Roberts reminded Nadler of where he was.
In two hours on Saturday morning, the president’s counsel, Pat Cipollone and Jay Sekulow, reduced the interminable malign verbosity of Schiff and Nadler to rubble.
Legally, there is no case and the barrage of unsupported allegations prosecutors launched came from the same Schiff who said he had solid evidence of Trump-Russian collusion and that he had not met the whistleblower (until the normally docile New York Times corrected him). And both he and Nadler claimed throughout that Trump had been fairly treated by the House Judiciary Committee when everyone in the world who watched its ludicrous proceedings saw in five minutes that the president could not call or examine witnesses, and his counsel was not allowed to be present.
These people are so consumed by their hatred of the president they cannot even speak truthfully in the presence of millions of viewers who know what they are saying is false.
This impeachment is a dead, rotting fish, devised and promoted for contemptible motives by unworthy legislators and unsupported by law or fact . . . it is an abusive perversion of the Constitution.
Schiff and Nadler even broke out the violins for the Ukrainians, to whom Trump has supplied the anti-tank weapons that have enabled them to stabilize their border with Russia, hardware Obama had withheld
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "everything's going Trump's way"
Really? Then how do you explain that he's the first president in history to have never had a positive job approval rating?
He's being rightfully tried for bribery and Republican's are starting to peel away from corrupt Mitch McConnell.
Explosive revelations are coming almost daily and its clear that's going to continue right up until election day.
So, yeah, "everything's going Trump's way", lol!
Corrupt defence lawyer Alan Dershowitz trying to argue that to be impeached a president must have committed a federal crime.
Trouble for Dershowitz is that he argued the exact opposite when Clinton was being impeached.
When asked if he was wrong then Dershowitz childishly replied "I was correct then and I'm more correct now".
This is the sort of pathetic excuse the president's defenders have been lowered to making because there isn't any exculpatory evidence for Trump. That's why he won't release a single document to congress which violates the constitution.
And of course the GAO said Trump did commit a crime by withholding desperately needed military aid for his personal benefit.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "to be fair, the Dems do have one major accomplishment: they passed Trump's North American trade agreement"
*raises hand* Oo! Oo! Oo! I know this one!
Lets talk about that farce that was Trump "renegotiating" the North American Free Trade Agreement.
The new NAFTA is virtually identical to the previous NAFTA. The whole point of cancelling it was to put Trump's name on NAFTA. So Trump cancelled it to bring back the same thing so it can have his name on it, just like he was hoping to do with the Iran nuclear agreement.
Trump wants to be seen as this great negotiator when he's nothing of the sort. So he kills perfectly good agreements in the hopse that he can renegotiate the same thing except this time he can falsely claim it was "his" deal". That charade worked with NAFTA but it won't work with the Iranian Nuclear Agreement Trump reneged on. Trump is just giving Iran justification for restarting work on getting a nuclear weapon. Iran won't give in to a weak president who looks headed towards a major defeat in November, if he's not removed from power before then. Make no mistake about it, Republicans could spin on a dime in their current support for Trump's corruption.
Things we've learned about anti-gay evangelicals over the last three years:
They like pussy grabbing, abortions for Republicans' mistresses, cheating with porn stars, wife beaters, child molesters and white supremacists.
Then they go to church, wave a bible, and claim it's all forgiven.
That divine forgiveness the evilgelicals like so much to harp on - you are only allowed one helping.
Republicans don't judge morality on the basis of actions, they judge morality based on who is performing the act.
Democrats are held to a standard of moral perfection and Republicans aren't held to any standard at all.
I am not a crook
I am a crook, so what?
House Republican leadership used a closed party meeting this morning to concede they are in the midst of a full blown fundraising crisis, after the @DCCC outraised the @NRCC by $40 million in 2019. Individual Democratic candidates are also smoking their Republican opponents.
Yep, "everything's going Trump's way, lol :)
If I were an amoral Republican politician this is the week I would hang trump out to dry. If trump has taught us one thing it's that there is no bottom it's not like worse evidence wont float to the surface next week. Republicans need to dump trump but the whole time doing it throw him under the bus as hard as they can. Rewrite history saying they were always sceptical about his morals and that he has betrayed the country and that everything "good" that his administration has done is because of pence working behind the scenes. The majority of Republicans will vote for a Republican regardless of what they have done so I think the backlash would be manageable and pence is the milk toast wet dream that most never trumpers have always wanted he is more electable then trump.
The time has come for the media to start talking about what this is doing to the head judge of SCOTUS. Knowing criminal things are going on and he unwillingly is part of the coverup. He will have to live with this or stand up and say enough is enough, and say I cannot be part of this drug deal anymore. After all he took a oath to defend the constitution against all evils.
If he doesn't put a stop to this travesty of a trial soon, his legacy will be sullied and will be in the history books forever as the patsy who rubber-stamped a criminal operation.
Apparently, what he most certainly CAN do, according to former Solicitor General Neal Katyal and others, Chief Justice Roberts can, on his own, decide that this trial in the Senate must have witness testimony and other evidence, if the Republicans vote to block it. He speaks in a recent op-ed in the NYT:
"Apparently, what he most certainly CAN do, according to former Solicitor General Neal Katyal and others, Chief Justice Roberts can, on his own, decide that this trial in the Senate must have witness testimony and other evidence, if the Republicans vote to block it."
he won't
there is nothing to be added by "witnesses"
witnesses to what?
the defense has already proven that the Ukrainians didn't know that aid was coming
hence, Trump couldn't have possibly have pressured them by threatening to withhold the aid
so, whether Bolton is telling the truth or just trying to sell his book, it doesn't matter what Trump told him
btw, the Dems appear headed to nominate Bernie Sanders which is the greatest exampe of suicide by a major party since 1964
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "there is nothing to be added by "witnesses"".
Earlier you said the prosecutions case was underwhelming because there were not fact/first hand witnesses. So, if you admit the prosecutions case would be stronger with Mulvaney, Pompeo, Bolton, and others testifying why wouldn't you want that given your oath to be an impartial juror.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "witnesses to what?"
Witnesses to Trump's pressure campaign on the Ukrainian president to announce fake investigations into the Bidens of course. You bitched that there weren't first hand witnesses there, well, so subpoena them and let them tell what they know.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the defense has already proven that the Ukrainians didn't know that aid was coming hence, Trump couldn't have possibly have pressured them by threatening to withhold the aid".
Yawn - more lies.
The "defence" presented not a shred of exculpatory evidence, they didn't prove a thing. The "defence" didn't dispute a single fact in the prosecution's case, they admitted Trump did it.
In the phone call Zelensky did ask about the 300 million in defence aid and Trump said "But I need a favour though", and then again asked for a fake investigation into the Bidens.
Beyond that Guiliani and Parnas and Fruman, all working for Trump, had been harrassing the Ukrainians for months pressuring them to announce a fake investigation into the Bidens. Parnas has presented a mountain of corroborating evidence including text messages, phone calls, contemporaneous notes, letters and on and on. You know the kind of evidence Mitch McConnell is doing everything in his power to keep out of the trial.
So, yeah...Wyatt and Regina with absurd lies not even Trump's "defence" team is making.
So many folks talk about how they're being "forced to accept" things that go against their beliefs.
You're not being forced to accept them.
If you have a problem with blacks, with gay marriage, with trans people, with immigrants, with women of any race, etc. then you're still welcome to feel however you want about those people. You're just not allowed to make their lives harder because of your feelings. You're not allowed to turn their daily lives into a battle ground.
No one is forcing you to "accept" a single thing. You're just not being allowed to terrorize people.
Senator Diane Feinstein was asked by reporters whether or not she would ultimately vote to acquit President Trump.
“Nine months left to go, the people should judge," Feinstein said, according to the paper, alluding to the 2020 presidential election. "We are a republic, we are based on the will of the people -- the people should judge.”
“That was my view and it still is my view," she added.
President Donald Trump’s opponents are using the same failed tactics to derail the president’s agenda for the crime of winning the 2016 election. On Sunday, The New York Times published leaked details of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s upcoming book accusing Trump of tying nearly $400 million in military aid to extracting politically motivated investigations into the Biden family.
Never mind that the book leak arrived on the same day that it became available for online pre-ordering, came unsubstantiated, and surfaced from a former White House aide with an axe to grind over his removal. The late leak is reminiscent of previous attempts to sabotage the Trump presidency with unfair operations pushing shady allegations via anonymous sources with no actual evidence paraded as “bombshells” in a compliant media.
The American people have now seen this kind of rollout happen throughout Trump’s time in the Oval Office. It happened with Russia, it happened with Ukraine, it happened with Brett Kavanaugh, and now it’s happening with impeachment.
Earlier this month, correspondent Byron York predicted the precedent playing out after former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas took his turn trotting out new accusations of Trump’s alleged wrongdoing in the media.
From now until the trial is over, and perhaps beyond, Republicans expect Democrats to come up with some new something on a regular, if not daily, basis. GOP defenders are beginning to see the next month in the Senate not so much as an impeachment trial but as a replay of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings: a fait accompli that becomes a cliffhanger with new and progressively more spectacular allegations. None of them were true, but they threw Republicans on the defensive and plunged the confirmation into chaos for a while.
For Democrats facing an uphill climb in a Republican-controlled Senate, why not try the same thing at the very highest level, an effort to remove the president?
That new “bombshell” evidence from Parnas proving an apparent quid pro quo between the president and Ukraine? An undated note repeating a claim made by a guy who has been indicted for fraud.
It’s also worth noting that Parnas is the guy who claimed House Intelligence Committee ranking Republican Devin Nunes of California met with Ukraine prosecutor Viktor Shokin in Vienna in December 2018. Nunes, however, proved he was on a congressional trip to Malta and Libya meeting with government officials and has since filed a lawsuit against CNN for defamation after reporting that the meeting ever actually took place. Remember when Michael Cohen went to Prague?
It’s a formula that has become all-too-familiar over the course of Trump’s presidency. While it might seem like ages, it was only less than a year and a half ago that Democrats were playing the same game in an effort to disrupt Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.
As it looked increasingly likely that Kavanaugh was on the path to successful confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate in fall 2018, Democrats brought forward uncorroborated and even contradicted allegations of sexual assault against the highly respected judge from more than 30 years ago.
Psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford was the first of several women to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, yet offered no proof that the two had even ever met. Ford was also unable to recall exactly where and when the alleged episode happened, and not one of the four alleged witnesses she named to the event supported Ford’s claims.
Three other women notably came forward with stories of sexual misconduct and were propped up as Me Too heroes in the media, including a former government employee name Julie Swetnick represented by Michael Avenatti, who is currently on trial for extortion.
Swetnick claimed Kavanaugh was operating a serial gang rape operation throughout the Maryland suburbs as a teenager. Judy Munro-Leighton later confessed to fabricating a rape story by Kavanaugh to Democratic California Sen. Kamala Harris.
Of course, the American public failed to get behind the accusations and demand Kavanaugh’s nomination be revoked. Instead, the delay tactics backfired on Democrats, who paid an electoral price by losing Senate seats in states that were seen as prime pick-up opportunities to flip control of the Senate.
Now Trump’s opponents are repeating the mistakes of the past by delaying the impeachment process as long as they can to tarnish Trump’s reputation.
There is no chance Trump will be removed from office at the conclusion of the Senate impeachment trial. Nancy Pelosi knows it, Chuck Schumer knows it, Mitch McConnell knows it, the White House knows it, and even the media knows it. In a desperate attempt to keep the impeachment process ongoing, and arguably to rig the Democratic primary for former Vice President Joe Biden by keeping rival senators off the campaign trail in the weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Speaker Pelosi went as far as to withhold the impeachment articles from the upper chamber for weeks after they were passed.
Assuming Bolton’s latest around of accusations in his book are true that Trump wanted Ukraine military aid tied to demands for investigations beneficial to U.S. interests, that’s hardly grounds for removal.
To begin, Trump never pressured Ukraine for a “favor” to investigate the Biden family in a bid to disrupt Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. While Democrats with the help of a complicit media have hyped a false narrative that Trump demanded Ukraine interfere in the next U.S. presidential election in a July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, an honest reading of the call’s transcript reveals no such arrangement.
The revelation from the transcript’s release show Trump urging Zelensky to weed out corruption in his own country and investigate Ukraine’s origins in promoting the Russian collusion conspiracy theory that did irreparable harm to the United States. Part of that corruption happens to center on Hunter Biden’s role serving on the board of a Ukrainian energy company raking in $50,000 to $80,000 a month, despite no prior experience in the industry, while his father dictated U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine.
It’s hardly a bad thing to tie foreign assistance to actions that favor U.S. interests, let alone a “high crime and misdemeanor” worthy of an impeachable offense.
The last-minute Bolton book leaks should come at no surprise to Washington observers, and there will likely be more revelations of no substance to emerge this week as “bombshells” paraded in the press either this week or next as the Senate impeachment trial wraps up absent new witnesses.
the longer the Dems stretch out impeachment, the higher Trump's approval gets
yesterday, he unveiled a brilliant Mideast peace plan while Dems tried to help sell books for their new best friend, John Bolton
you think voters don't notice who's at work and who is still trying to overturn their 2016 decision?
Trump's approval is at an all-time high:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html
extrapolating trend lines seem to suggest a landslide victory in November
George McGovern and Barry Goldwater are about to get a new friend: the Bern!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
wait, maybe the Dems can get out of this by impeaching Donald Trump
they only need 67 votes in the Senate !!
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"So many folks talk about how they're being "forced to accept" things that go against their beliefs."
Funny, I've never hear anyone say that.
Has anyone else heard this?
Who is this "Priya Lynn" idiot?
I posted "So many folks talk about how they're being "forced to accept" things that go against their beliefs."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Funny, I've never hear anyone say that.".
I've heard you two say some variation of that dozens and dozens of times.
My former student Judge Starr emphasizes that prior impeachments have been bipartisan. He assumes that this is a criticism of Democrats who have proceeded alone rather than of the GOP members who have refused to consider joining in a serious critique of the president's actions
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the longer the Dems stretch out impeachment, the higher Trump's approval gets"
LOL, then why is Mitch McConnell rushing through the process as fast as he can?
This is standard Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous rhetoric. Throughout the 2008 and 2012 elections every few days they posted "Obama's poll numbers are in free fall!"
We all know how that turned out.
Both times.
Trump is the first president in history to have never had an approval rating above 50%. Without big help from Russia, he's toast.
That's why Mitch McConnell won't bring up for a vote any bipartisan House bills to protect the 2020 election. Republicans know Trump can't win without cheating - that's what this whole impeachment trial is about.
Remember how the Mueller Report came out with a 12 count criminal indictment of Trump for obstruction of justice and Republicans refused to hold him accountable?
Trump was mocking Nancy Pelosi, daring "nervous Nancy" to impeach him.
Well, you got what you wanted, President bone spurs. How's that working out for you?
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
the worst ever decision about the Middle East.
The USA gives the OK to Israel to annex the West Bank, make the Jordan Valley part of Israel, takes Jerusalem for an 'undivided capital, and gives a few isolated patches of desert to the Palestinians, and treats the Bible as a 'land deed', with liberal use of biblical terms of 'Samaria' and 'Judea' for the enthusiastic ultras...............
The whole so called 'Middle East Plan' conceived in secret by Kushner and winning the approval only of Israel, is a recipe for eternal war in the Middle East, not a plan for peace. It violates every clause of the Oslo agreement to which all parties are signatories.
It has been denounced by just about everyone, except the Arab countries ( we await their response. This brainchild of Kushner is just an election present for Netenyahu and can never be any basis for any consideration whatsoever.
And Israel's annexation of Palestinian land and land occupied since the 1967 war is in breach of all UN resolutions and in breach of previous Oslo agreements.
It is the most ill conceived blunder even foisted on the Middle East.....and by a little doctrinaire pro-Israel fascist, Kushner.
The Israeli occupied Palestinian territories is a crime against humanity.
And this stupidity has long term consequences for conflict.
USA/Israel has totally betrayed all the previous inching forward.....decades of talks and negotiations have been discarded just for Israel's biblical pretensions.
"Promises" made in magic books should not be allowed to destroy a planet.
"I've heard you two say some variation of that dozens and dozens of times."
Ms Lynn, you seemed fixated on some person (or persons). Have you considered counseling to overcome this obsession?
You said "So many folks talk about how they're being "forced to accept" things that go against their beliefs" so surely you have so many examples.
Could you give us five examples of anyone else making this statement?
If not, I think we are safe in concluding you lie.
"Walter Dellinger said...
My former student Judge Starr emphasizes that prior impeachments have been bipartisan. He assumes that this is a criticism of Democrats who have proceeded alone rather than of the GOP members who have refused to consider joining in a serious critique of the president's actions"
Walter, you idiot, impeachments were intended for serious matters of such grave concern that virtually everyone agrees.
There are records of the discussions of the Founding fathers when writing the Constitution. They specifically addressed vague charges that could be used as political tools and decided to leave them out.
If the Senate voted to remove Trump, every future President would be impeached when the House is controlled by the opposition.
History books have not been kind to those who voted for Andrew Johnson's impeachment and conviction. Indeed, JFK's book, Profiles in Courage, has chapter on the guys who had the courage to vote against Johnson's removal.
Someday, there will be a book called Profiles in Cowardice, with a chapter on Nancy Pelosi.
For those of you looking -- praying -- for a break from the Democrats impeachment farce, there’s new and very positive polling from Gallup on the economy.
The results were very encouraging for Americans in general -- and for Republicans in particular.
For the Democrats, arguing against this vibrant economy is becoming more difficult every month.
According to the poll released on Sunday, 55 percent of Americans rate the economy as “excellent” or “good,” the highest percentage since January 2001. A record-high 20 percent say the economy is “excellent” up from 3 percent in December 2016 -- the Obama administration’s final month.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Americans credit Trump for the improved economy.
Asked who or what they think is most responsible for the current economy, 42 percent credited Trump and Republicans while only 9 percent credited Obama and Democrats and 7 percent credited big business.
Gallup’s economic confidence numbers for January showed that Americans' confidence in the U.S. economy is higher than at any point since October 2000, with 62 percent of Americans rating the economy as "excellent" or "good" and 59 percent saying its "getting better."
As a further indication of Americans’ economic confidence, the percentage of Americans naming economic issues as the country's greatest problem dropped to 10 percent.
By a full percentage point, that’s the lowest percentage since Gallup began compiling mentions of economic issues in 2001.
Gallup summed the situation up nicely: “Rarely in the years that Gallup has tracked public ratings of the economy, since the early 1990s, have Americans had higher confidence in the economy than they do now.”
Obviously, with an election coming, this is bad news for Democrats.
Even Gallup acknowledges that this “greater confidence could serve as a boost to the reelection prospects of President Donald Trump.”
So, despite the Democrats' best efforts, dire warnings of an economic collapse or an impending recession just don’t seem to have convinced Americans that their economic sky is falling.
That may surprise you if you’ve been watching the millionaires and billionaires on the Democratic presidential debate stage describe how millionaires and billionaires are bilking ordinary Americans and holding back what would otherwise be dynamic economic growth.
Apparently few people outside the hardcore Progressive bubble believed that anyway.
So, what else is there for the Democrats to argue?
Democratic financier extraordinaire George Soros has a suggestion. Speaking at a dinner in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday, Soros said that “Trump’s economic team has managed to overheat an already buoyant economy.” Apparently, the economy was actually “buoyant” rather than heading towards recession as Democrats and their media allies argued last August, inverted yield curves be damned. Rather, Soros argues that this economy is so good it can’t last.
According to Soros, “an overheated economy can’t be kept boiling for too long. If all this had happened closer to the elections, it would have assured [Trump’s] reelection. His problem is that the elections are still 10 months away, and in a revolutionary situation, that is a lifetime.”
I’m not sure what “revolution” Soros is waiting for, but he’s engaging in wishful thinking on the economy.
The current economic surge should continue through at least the upcoming election, if not the election in 2022.
While we are surely at or very near full employment, as of November (the most recent month for which we have the data) there were still about 1 million more job openings than people unemployed.
This is strong evidence that the competition for employees that has been driving wage growth will continue.
With more people employed at higher wages and taking home more of what they earn (thanks to the Republican tax cuts), consumer spending, which accounts for about two-thirds of our economic growth, should remain strong.
But what about the impact of President Trump’s trade policies on economic growth?
In September, the Federal Reserve released a study suggesting that trade policy uncertainty could reduce U.S. economic output by more than 1 percent through early 2020.
That risk strikes me as overstated, but, in any event, the uncertainties in trade policy have been meaningfully reduced since last September.
In January, Congress passed the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (“USMCA”).
According to a study by the United States International Trade Commission, the USMCA will increase GDP by $68.2 billion and employment by 176,000 jobs.
It will “likely have a positive impact on U.S. trade, both with USMCA partners and with the rest of the world” benefiting “all broad industry sectors within the U.S. economy.”
The largest “gains in output, exports, wages, and employment” would be in the manufacturing sector.
Also in January, President Trump signed the “phase one” trade agreement with China reducing the trade tensions with that country.
In addition to “structural reforms and other changes in the areas of “intellectual property, technology transfer, agriculture, financial services, and currency and foreign exchange, China agreed to increase its purchases of U.S. exports by at least $200 billion over the next two years, reducing the trade gap and, like the USMCA, boosting U.S. GDP.
This is all in addition to President Trump’s and the Republicans’ ongoing regulatory reductions, tax cuts and focus on domestic energy production, all of which have been energizing economic growth and driving a blue collar/middle class economy -- much to the consternation of progressives.
Of course, no economic recovery lasts forever, but this economy is robust, not overheated; there is a lot of room for growth going forward, and it will continue to benefit Americans regardless of race, age, gender, or financial status.
As the Gallup poll demonstrates, the American people get this despite ongoing efforts to convince them either that it isn’t happening or that it can’t last.
A trio of Senate Democrats is resisting pressure from the Dem leadership vote to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial, should give the president the bipartisan acquittal he’s eagerly seeking.
Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Doug Jones of Alabama have not been convinced to vote to remove the president from office, said Manchin.
It’s a decision that will have major ramifications for each senator’s legacy and political prospects — as well shape the broader political dynamic surrounding impeachment heading into the 2020 election.
All three senators remain unconvinced after hearing arguments from the impeachment managers and Trump’s defense team.
Nuts like TTers are not a new or unique phenomenon, people like them have always existed. More than two centuries ago they were locked up in nuthouses. In modern times, they wander the streets, wrapped in filthy blankets, muttering to themselves.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "homosexuals partners never have kids. what kind of fool calls that marriage?"
Oooo, someone is angry!
Trump's going down.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Ms Lynn..."
So much for Wyatt and Regina's spittle flecked rant about how they'll "never respond to Priya ever again!!!!".
Hahahahahahahahaha!!!
They also referred to me as a female, something they said they never do.
So, I guess that's progress.
Let's have a hand for Wyatt and Regina Hardiman folks! They're making progress :)
Hey Wyatt/Regina, you still haven't answered the question.
As you consider my husband and I two gay men and that society should force us apart...
How are my husband and I better off apart from each other?
392 days and Wyatt and Regina are still afraid to even try to respond.
Fascism is male insecurity put in political action
In Trump, in Putin, in Netanyahu, in Kim Jong Un, in every one of these authoritarians and despots there is a bleeding wound that cannot be healed, an insatiable black hole of howling needs.
The Autocratic Disease:
The growth of authoritarianism and the rise of so-called strong men share something in common: tragically, dangerously, insecure men.
If the IMPOTUS was concerned about corruption in Ukraine...Why didn't he advocate for investigating his first campaign manager, PAUL MANIFORT?
All the people close to Trump keep pleading guilty to crimes, getting charged with crimes, or convicted of crimes. And Republicans expect us to believe Trump isn't irredeemably corrupt?
Give me a break!
Honestly, as far as I'm concerned, the Republicans need to all shut up about how long this is taking until AT LEAST as many hours of testimony have happened as they demanded for the Benghazi kangaroo court.
Gardner Caves To Trump’s Threats On Trial Witnesses
Republican Sen. Cory Gardner said Wednesday that he thinks the Senate has heard from enough witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. The problem is the senate has not heard from one single witness. Mitch McConnll said he wouldn't be an impartial juror, the Senate trial is a sham as long as he has a part in it. #GOPCoverup
Only in the House of Congress inquiry did witnesses testify. What have they said?
Laura K. Cooper: was one of multiple Pentagon officials who warned the White House that freezing congressionally approved aid to Ukraine could violate the law.
Catherine Croft: According to a copy of her opening statement, Croft told lawmakers she received calls from a lobbyist trying to oust Yovanovitch. She said she learned that aid was put on hold stemming from an order from the president.
Michael McKinley: In his opening statement, Anderson said Giuliani's efforts were discussed at a Ukraine strategy meeting over the summer. At that meeting, Bolton said Giuliani's efforts "could be an obstacle." Anderson said he believed it was important to not request specific investigations from the Ukrainians.
Christopher Anderson: In his opening statement, Anderson said Giuliani's efforts were discussed at a Ukraine strategy meeting over the summer. At that meeting, Bolton said Giuliani's efforts "could be an obstacle." Anderson said he believed it was important to not request specific investigations from the Ukrainians.
David Hale: Hale told lawmakers about the political considerations in dismissing Yovanovitch and how those decisions affected military aid for Ukraine.
In his Nov. 20 public testimony, Hale said the State Department's decision not to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch could only be made by someone "more senior to me. The Secretary most likely would have been the person."
Phillip Reeker: According to The Wall Street Journal, he discussed with lawmakers failed efforts to help Yovanovitch.
Mark Sandy: Documents presented during the deposition of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Laura Cooper showed that Sandy signed one of the "apportionment" letters in July 2019 halting security assistance to Ukraine
George Kent: The deputy assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs, Kent is a career State Department official who oversees U.S. policy on Ukraine. In October, he testified that the White House plan to pressure Ukraine to investigate “corruption” in the country was code for its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to look for compromising information on Trump’s political opponents. Kent testified publicly on Wednesday, November 13.
Bill Taylor: A career diplomat and the acting ambassador to Ukraine, Taylor expressed his concerns over the president’s quid pro quo in September, writing, “I think it’s crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign” in text messages to U.S. ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland. Taylor testified publicly on Wednesday, November 13.
Marie Yovanovitch: A diplomat who served under the Bush and Obama administrations, Yovanovitch was recalled from her position as ambassador to Ukraine in May. Prior to her removal, she was a major force supporting anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine, which helps explain why Trump got rid of her in order to push the quid pro quo, an entry-level move of corrupt politicians. Yovanovitch testified publicly on Friday, November 15.
Alexander Vindman: The top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, Vindman told the impeachment inquiry last month that “outside influencers [promoted] a false narrative of Ukraine,” referring to the team of Rudy Giuliani. Vindman was on the July 25 call in which Trump pressed Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden. Vindman testified publicly on Tuesday, November 19.
Jennifer Williams: A State Department official and special advisor to Mike Pence on European and Russian affairs, Williams was in the White House Situation Room listening to the July 25 call in which Trump pressured President Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden. Williams testified publicly on Tuesday, November 19.
Kurt Volker: The former U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, Volker resigned following the whistle-blower’s report which mentioned that he served as a conduit for Ukrainian officials to communicate with Rudy Giuliani. Texts that Volker provided to Congress also establish that President Zelensky understood that a potential visit to the White House depended upon an investigation into the conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election, not Russia. Volker testified publicly on Tuesday, November 19.
Tim Morrison: The top National Security Council expert on Russia until he resigned before his closed-door testimony last month, Morrison confirmed the account of acting ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, who testified that Trump wanted the Ukrainian government to publicly announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business dealings before aid would be released. Morrison testified publicly on Tuesday, November 19.
Gordon Sondland: The U.N. ambassador’s testimony was the most dramatic of the House impeachment hearings so far. Sondland threw the president and multiple top Trump administration officials under the bus, saying there was a “clear quid pro quo” in their efforts to make President Volodymyr Zelensky’s meeting with Trump contingent on announcing investigations into his political rivals.
Fiona Hill: The National Security Council’s former top adviser on Russia, who resigned in August, Hill is expected to rebut the “fictional narrative” pushed by Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and other Republicans about Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 election meddling.
David Holmes: A high-ranking staffer at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Holmes overheard a July 26 call from U.N. Ambassador Gordon Sondland to President Trump the day after Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy to investigate the Bidens.
Wyatt/Regina said the case for convicting Trump is underwhelming because there were no first hand witnesses.
Trump and the Republicans blocked first hand witnesses from testifying and now they are using that lack of testimony as an excuse to put Trump above the law.
Senators took an oath to do impartial justice. For the sake of American democracy, god help them do it.
Rep. Crow: "We are here for one reason and one reason only. POTUS withheld foreign aid that he was happy to give the 2 prior years. Suddenly we are to believe something changed? He had an epiphany about corruptin within a week of Biden announcing his candidacy?
Elizabeth Warren's entire proposal is for it to be illegal for social media platforms to leave up and allow to be promoted posts which do things like tell people to vote on the wrong day, tell them their polling places have been changed, tell them they can vote using their phones rather than casting a ballot, tell them they'll be arrested on the spot if they have any outstanding fines or warrants if they try to vote, tell them their registrations have been canceled, tell them to vote in ways that guarantee ballot spoilage, and on and on.
All this shit happened during 2016 and 2018, all of it on the GOP side, and so far there's been no way to stop it. Social media companies aren't even *required* to take down that false information which exists solely to stop people from lawfully casting their ballots. And worse, social media has algorithms and user tracking such that any bad actor can *directly* micro-target the audiences they want to keep from voting.
But everyone wanted to make it like 'free speech' in the political realm would be outlawed, which would never pass Constitutional muster anyway. And Liz isn't dumb that way.
idk who needs to hear this but you are significantly closer to being homeless than you will ever be to being a billionaire, have some class solidarity and stop glorifying your oppressors.
So that everyone is clear, Trump's team is simultaneously arguing that the House should enforce its subpoenas in court *and* that it is unconstitutional for a court to enforce the House's subpoenas.
These are really low approval numbers for an incumbent.
Trump Job Approval
Among adults:
Approve 39%
Disapprove 55%
Among registered voters:
Approve 41%
Disapprove 56%
Everything is going Trump's way!
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
They are saying that abuses of power in order to get re-elected could be considered in the national interest and therefore not impeachable. If that doesn't worry you I just don't know what to say.
"If that doesn't worry you I just don't know what to say."
That's been obvious for a while and, unfortunately, hasn't stopped from saying stupid things.
"It was clear to Senate Republicans on Wednesday after a morning meeting between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that the question of having additional witnesses is settled, and the Senate will vote Friday to wrap up the impeachment trial of President Trump.
Wonder how that will go?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahoho!!!!!!!!!!!
"There was no discussion of witnesses at a Senate GOP lunch meeting Wednesday, which was held a couple hours after McConnell and Murkowski met for about 20 to 30 minutes.
That was seen as a sign by several senators that Democrats will fail to convince four Republicans to join them in calling for witnesses. Without a vote to hear from witnesses, the trial will end Friday.
“We’re going to get it done by Friday,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said following the meeting.
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), emerging from the lunch, said, “I think I can say the mood is good.”
Braun expressed confidence that McConnell will be able to keep his conference unified enough to defeat a motion to consider subpoenas for additional witnesses and documents.
“If I had to guess, no witnesses,” he said.
“We’ll be in a place where I think everyone is going to have their mind made up and I believe that we’ll be able to move to a verdict, and the witness question will be clear at that point,” Braun added.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who has been the most outspoken jackass for calling additional witnesses, declined to comment as he left the lunch.
Romney and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) are both expected to back witnesses. Murkowski has been seen as a third possible vote, though she had not announced any decision.
Instead of discussing the possibility of having former national security adviser John Bolton appear as a witness in the trial at Wednesday's meeting, lawmakers talked about voting Friday to move quickly to an up-or-down vote on two articles of impeachment."
"It was clear to Senate Republicans on Wednesday after a morning meeting between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) that the question of having additional witnesses is settled, and the Senate will vote Friday to wrap up the impeachment trial of President Trump."
JOLLY GOOD SHOW !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Jan. 30 (UPI) -- The Trump administration has imposed sanctions against a Moscow-based private railway company and seven Russian-backed officials in connection to the country's continued attempts to occupy the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.
The U.S. Treasury Department issued the sanctions Wednesday against Grand Service Express and its CEO Alexander Ganov after the company began a passenger service late last month between Russia and Crimea over the newly constructed, $4 billion Kerch Strait Bridge, stating the move was done in support of Russian efforts to deepen the economic integration of the two regions.
Current Trump defence lawyer Dershowitz Blistered Trump for Corruption in 2016
Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz absolutely hammered Trump for massive corruption during the 2016 election, calling him a “destabilizing and unpredictable candidate” who “openly embraces fringe conspiracy theories peddled by extremists” and that it was clear that he was “prepared to violate existing international and domestic laws.”
"Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a member of President Donald Trump’s impeachment legal team, said in 2016 that Trump was more corrupt than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. He also predicted that Trump would continue to be corrupt, if elected.
Dershowitz predicted in another interview cited by CNN that Trump would “embolden and strengthen some of the fascist elements in our society.”
He also wrote in his 2016 book that Trump was a “destabilizing and unpredictable candidate” who “openly embraces fringe conspiracy theories peddled by extremists,” according to NBC News. Discussing Trump’s foreign policy, Dershowitz added that it was “clear that Trump is prepared to violate existing international and domestic laws.”"
He was right, of course. Trump was corrupt and has only gotten more brazen since gaining the power to profit from being president in multiple ways and to exert enormous pressure on others to do his bidding.
McConnell Admits He Lacks Votes to Block Witness Testimony
John Bolton’s recent revelation that Trump told him personally that he wanted to block nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine to force them to investigate his Democratic rival Joe Biden has so thrown the GOP into turmoil that Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell now admits he doesn’t have the votes anymore to block witnesses from testifying.
In a closed-door meeting after closing remarks, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told colleagues he doesn’t have the votes to block witnesses, according to people familiar with his remarks who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them. Just four GOP senators would have to join with Democrats to produce the majority needed to call witnesses — an outcome McConnell has sought to avoid since it could invite new controversy and draw out the proceedings.
Another Blatant Contradiction in the Trump Impeachment Defense
Adam Schiff pointed out yet another contradiction in the defense offered by Trump’s attorneys in the impeachment trial. He did so by digging out the briefs filed in the case over enforcing House subpoenas on Trump aides and White House employees, in which they argued, bizarrely, that the House lacked standing to bring such a suit.
Schiff then read the DOJ’s statement from The Committee on Judiciary vs. Don McGahn:
"“Summary of argument: The committee lacks Article III standing to sue to enforce a Congressional subpoena demanding testimony from an individual on matters related to his duties in the executive branch official.”
Since the Trump team believes the House lacked standing, the only way they could get the standing to call witnesses was through an official impeachment inquiry.
“So, here they are,” said Schiff. “The president’s lawyers are this duplicitous, I kid you not, they come into the Senate, which they refer to as a court, and they say the House should have sued in court to enforce subpoenas like John Bolton. And they go to court and they say, ‘the House may not sue in court to compel a witness to testify. That is the legal duplicity of the president’s team. And it’s in black and white. So, that’s basically it. Are we going to get a fair trial or are we not?”"
Of course they aren’t getting a fair trial. If the trial were fair, Trump loses. They won’t — can’t — allow that to happen. That’s why they keep making contradictory arguments and lying in their defense.
TruNews, the far-right Christian “news” site owned by whacked out conspiracy nut Rick Wiles, received White House credentials and a special invitation yet again for a major event. Despite Wiles’ long history of vicious anti-Semitism, he was given credentials to cover Trump’s trip to the Davos meeting of the world’s wealthiest people in Switzerland.
The founder of TruNews claimed that President Donald Trump’s impeachment was a “Jew coup” organized by a “Jewish cabal” in anti-Semitic remarks.
He supports Trump, so it doesn’t matter that he’s practically a neo-Nazi. Actually, that may be precisely why he keeps getting credentials for events like this. He fits the profile perfectly.
My question to the Senate:
In his impeachment, President Clinton was forced to testify. Why doesn't the same rule apply to Trump?
He's a tough guy on Twitter...let's see how he does under oath.
Israeli President Netanyahu has been charged with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. I guess Trump will suspend aid to Israel until they can show they are cleaning up their corruption. Or promise they will investigate the Bidens.
According to Trump defence lawyer Dershowitz, if Trump decided rounding up American citizens who plan to vote against him was in the national interest, he couldn't be impeached for doing it.
Every impeachment trial in the Senate has had new witnesses!
That's 15 trials...
Global Peace Index:
#1 Iceland
#6 Canada
#128 USA
http://disq.us/url?url=http%3A%2F%2Fvisionofhumanity.org%2Findexes%2Fglobal-peace-index%2F%3AdK-Aa0k_u76yrU33T2bOCIufPT8&cuid=1478235
"According to Trump defence lawyer Dershowitz, if Trump decided rounding up American citizens who plan to vote against him was in the national interest, he couldn't be impeached for doing it."
this is a lie making its rounds in the mainstream media, aka the DNC support group
what Harvard law professor emeritus Dershowitz said was making policy decisions with a partially political motive isn't impeachable unless it involves a criminal act
his view will prevail because, otherwise, every President who's party doesn't control the House and who looks strong for re-election, like Trump, will be impeached
every President, indeed every living person on the planet, does things with mixed motives every day
"Wisco said...
Global Peace Index:
#1 Iceland
#6 Canada
#128 USA"
you have permission to leave, Wisco
try North Korea, everything is always peaceful there
don't the screen door slam your ass on the way out
And Chief Justice Roberts had to read it.
"At a time when large majorities of Americans have lost faith in government, does the fact that the Chief Justice is presiding over an impeachment trial in which Republican Senators thus far refuse to allow witnesses or evidence contribute to the loss of legitimacy of the Chief Justice, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution."
"A Kiev art museum contains a curious icon from St. Catherine's Monastery on Mt. Sinai in Israel. It shows two robed Christian saints. Between them is a traditional Roman ‘pronubus’ (a best man), overseeing a wedding. The pronubus is Christ. The married couple are both men."
" The two men featured in the icon, St. Sergius and St. Bacchus."
Also in the bible: 1 Samuel 18:1 And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.
Good anonymous said "According to Trump defence lawyer Dershowitz, if Trump decided rounding up American citizens who plan to vote against him was in the national interest, he couldn't be impeached for doing it."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this is a lie"
No, its the scary truth of what the president's defence team is arguing. That necessarily follows from their position that the president can do whatever he wants if he thinks(claims) its in the nation's best interest.
They argued that if the president thinks(claims) his being re-elected is in the nation's best interest he can bribe foreign countries to cheat in the election like he did in Ukraine.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "what Dershowitz said [he admitted his view was far out of the legal profession mainstream] was making policy decisions with a partially political motive isn't impeachable unless it involves a criminal act"
He argued during the Clinton impeachment that it didn't require a criminal act to impeach a president. Dershowitz is on whatever side is paying him, he has no credibility.
Besides, Trump DID commit multiple criminal acts from threatening witnesses. The GAO also found that Trump committed a criminal act by witholding aid Ukraine desperately needed to defend itself from Russian aggression.
Dershowitz argued that the president can do whatever he wants if he thinks/claims its in the country's best interests.
That necessarily includes rounding up those who would vote against Trump.
Make no mistake about it, the president's defence lawyers are arguing Trump is above the law. The president's lawyers are arguing for Trump to be Dictator of the United States.
Trump never expressed the slightest concern about corruption in Ukraine until a week after Biden announced his run for president. Then suddenly he wants a foreign country to announce an investigation into the Bidens in particular with no concern for corruption in general.
If, as Trump's lawyers argued, this is a "policy disgreement", exactly what "policy" was this to advance beyond cheating to get Trump re-elected?
If as you falsely claim Dershowitz said, Trump's extortion was only "partially" about deceiving the American public to help with his re-election, what exactly was the other part of the policy that wasn't to benefit Trump personally? To ally with Russia and make NATO countries America's adversary?
"Wisco said...
Global Peace Index:
#1 Iceland
#6 Canada
#128 USA"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you have permission to leave, Wisco"
Wisco lives in Canada Wyatt/Regina, she doesn't need to leave.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "pushy transgenderism"
To Wyatt and Regina, its "pushy" to want to have the same rights they have and to be treated fairly.
Evangelical christians like them are using the First Amendment as a weapon to entrench the legal superiority of christians over harmless lgbt people into law.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman aren't about equality, they're about enforced superiority.
Speaking at a private event in Austin Thursday, Former National Security Advisor John Bolton defended government officials who testified in front of the U.S. House impeachment inquiry. Sources tell KXAN Bolton defended former officials Fiona Hill, Tim Morrison, Alex Vindman, Bill Taylor, and Marie Yovanovitch.
“All of them acted in the best interest of the country as they saw it and consistent to what they thought our policies were,” said Bolton, during the question-and-answer time after his keynote speech. He went on to say members of the Trump Administration should “feel they’re able to speak their minds without retribution.”
Evangelical christians then:
If Bill Clinton will lie to his wife and daughter to conceal his marital infidelity, what will prevent him from lying to the American public?
Evangelical christians now:
I think Trump's marital infidelity - Stormy Daniels and so forth - is a private family matter for him and his wife to deal with. It's nobody's business.
WATCH: Trump and his administration DO have a plan to replace Obamcare. It's to STRIP away your pre-existing conditions protections, your Medicaid, your Social Security Disability Insurance and replace it with NOTHING.
As shown by VP Pence here. Quiet CRUELTY.
Republican leaders in Congress believe - and privately say - that they ferar the country is quickly changing in ways that may soon deprive them of power, and that they must use the power they have now to delay it as long as possible,even by harming the Republic if necessary.
Isn't "harming the Republic" a crime?
"deprive them of power"...
Their "power" is supposed to be drived from the People.
What "power" do they think they have they're afraid of losing?
That’s a lie. Yes the GOP is worried about becoming a minority, but what they’re doing is looting the country on their way out the door.
From vouchers for non-accredited for-profit schools to oil leases in National parks, this is about robbing the country blind while they have the opportunity.
^^^^
WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!
In a day that will live in infamy, Republicans voted to not allow any witnesses or evidence in to the trial of Donald Trump.
Today Republicans cast their vote for putting Trump above the law and naming him Dictator.
God help the United States.
75% of Americans wanted witnesses at Trump's trial.
The public is going to hammer Republicans at the ballot box in November.
The only hope Trump has now is for Russia to overturn the 2020 election. Trump, the Russians, Mitch McConnell and the Republicans will be working overtime to do that.
If Trump, Putin, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham have their way this will be the day American democracy died.
Republican Senators took an oath to do fair and impartial justice and they did not. This was not justice.
#GOPCoverup
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